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"Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps."

Well I guess we can't expect journalists to know much about computers, but anyone who writes something like this ought to never write a word on computers again, nor should they be publishing attention-seeking articles like this one.

Feel free to point out the errors exactly. We went from a collaborative environment to near-zero connectivity as the norm. You could even see the fact that people still swap out .ptt and .doc files via e-mail as direct result of that.

We have far advanced the time-sharing era systems in terms of connectivity, but the comparison is not such a hyperbole as one might think. A lot of research today is a revitalisation of work developed for time-shared machines.

You mean because they were dumb terminals not actual workstations? That's a pretty niggling detail to rip your hair out over since it doesn't really change the essential truth of how the mode of computation has come full circle.

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