The computer industry goes in cycles. First, there was the mainframe. This was guarded by “The Operators” – the high priests of the expensive air conditioned and corporate owned data centre. You submitted a pack of punched cards and if you were lucky you got them back with some printouts the next day. My business partner is actually so old that he remembers those days.
Next came “time sharing”. You could dial up a data centre from a dumb terminal over a telephone line and pay by the minute. The problem was that line speeds meant a few characters were all that could be sent and received.
