A Little Perspective
Originally published March 18th, 2022
The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer had a 0.043 MHz processor, 32KB of RAM, and 72KB of ROM. It operated in the dead of space and helped land American astronauts on the moon, effectively signaling the end of the Space Race, furthering the end of the Soviet Union, and potentially saving the world from nuclear destruction. It did all this without connecting to a backend server.
Meanwhile, the iPhone in your pocket is approximately 100,000 times more powerful than the AGC and can barely do anything without a persistent connection to a data center hundreds of miles away.
Forty years ago, we called endpoints that used this same architecture "dumb terminals". Now, the tech industry is marveling at its own brilliance and calling the repetition of this same wasteful energy expenditure "intelligence"
Perhaps the "Dumb" designation should instead be applied to the modern developer, whom for whatever reason has decided to pursue the same architecture over four decades later. Every time I open an app whose entire function could be performed client-side were it not for a monetization decision, I can't help but shake my head and think "The Apollo 11 crew would've killed for this kind of power, and just look at what we're doing with it."