Dyson misses the point somewhat about virtual machines and cloud computing, which are much more about relocatable and rescalable computing — rather than having to house and maintain computers to handle the peak computational load, we can run software remotely as a service, and purchase resources on an as-needed basis; the providers of these services can reroute and reallocate resources in real-time without any intervention by or impact on their customers. There’s something here in Dyson’s statement alluding to parallel processing...
Comments
This is by the founder about IAS (aka (Turing's) [*Bazaar-]Cathedral) founding between war & depression, while it was still at 20 Nassau St
Further Quaker background by Freeman Dyson's son George who wrote that book having grown up there
https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2009/george-dyson-tavern-and-meeti...
*IAS was an open-maxxed Bell Labs
https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/700.php
Paradoxes for outwitting the uni-context..