Nobody Knows What to Call the Next Era of Computing

That we cannot yet agree on what to call the present era of computing likely speaks to the embedding of computing operations into most areas of life and the economy. Most would agree that the mainframe, minicomputer and PC eras were characterized by the types of computing devices. If so, some might suggest we are now in the era of mobile computing. 

Others might focus on the ubiquity of computing devices, moving from just a few mainframes to widespread mobile devices to embedded sensors. That might be said to imply a shift from “few, monolithic” to “many, distributed” to “everywhere, embedded.” 

source: Jeremy Abbett 

But architecture began to be important in the client-server era many consider the evolution from the PC era. The big change is the role of connectivity and communications. The “device” no longer is the essential foundation for computing. Instead, it is the networked nature of computing, or the lead applications or use cases that define the era. 

Some might broadly characterize the movement as from tabulating to programmable systems to cognition.  

So some might characterize the present era as being about “big data” or “cloud,” while the coming era might be foundationally about artificial intelligence, quantum computing or autonomous systems. 

Using that framework, we have moved from devices to the internet and web. Some might point to the coming era as based on artificial intelligence. Some might prefer to focus on “how” we do computing, harkening back to an earlier set of descriptors based more on devices. Those who believe we are headed for an era of “quantum” computing might take this view. 

source: Morgan Stanley 

Yet others might see the progression, since the time of the PC, as moving from “one computer, one user” to “one user, many computers” to “many computers, many users.” The movement there is from personal to collective. 

In that typology, we might refer to the mainframe and minicomputer eras as “few computers, few users.”

Most could agree that cloud computing is the era we presently inhabit. Again, it is the architecture that is foundational, not the devices. Others might call it the internet era, but the idea is the same: computing now is routinely conducted remotely, and computing operations extend to support for transactions and content consumption, beyond “work” functions. 

We are likely to have even broader suggested appellations for what comes next, as we could see changes in devices, locations, applications, architectures, use modes or core computing foundations, all at once. 

But one unifying theme is that connectivity or communications has become foundational for any of the characterizations since the “internet” era dawned. We have moved to remote computing, but are evolving towards heterogeneous computing as well.