The Glory Days of IT

The glory days of information technology was certainly in the mid-90’s to early 2000’s. With NetWare, which was a great network operating system. Also Windows NT 4.0 for Alpha, MIPS, and even PowerPC as well as IA-32. And Windows 95 and 98. Also UNIX, including AIX for PowerPC and PS/2, Solaris for SPARC and x86, HP-UX for PA-RISC and later Itanium, and IRIX for MIPS, not to mention SCO OpenServer and UnixWare. And the IBM Mainframe was great.

That was before Linux took over. UNIX has fallen.

Novell Open Enterprise Server supported NetWare until like 2012.

Windows 2000 was awesome. It had features, some very good, that were removed in XP. XP was the first version of Windows to have a number of features removed.

IRIX was discontinued in 2006.

How could IT be great until 2016-2020? Because of good new things. Windows 10 had some good new features like Cortana and Windows Subsystem for Linux and introduced Edge and was overall better than either 8 or 8.1. Server 2016 appeared and later 2019, both of which are great, although 2008 R2 may have been the best overall. In 2017 came the release of Edge for Android and iOS, the same year Microsoft killed Windows Phone. Windows 10 Mobile and Mobile Enterprise support ended in 2019. In 2020 came Hyper-V Integration for VMware Workstation, using Windows Hypervisor Platform. In 2019 came the release of Edge for Mac. Microsoft extended support for Server 2008 and Windows 7 by providing patches for enterprise customers until 2023, but it was only for volume licensed customers. OpenIO is a great distributed object store and had its initial release in 2015. Edit: I forgot one or two things. Chromium Edge came in 2020.

BM zEnterprise EC12 was the greatest version ever of IBM mainframe, released in 2012. zEnterprise/zBX was great. PureSystems was awesome too. IBM recently acquired Red Hat and started to use a lot of OpenShift. Why use OpenShift and not the more general Cloud Foundry? IBM also dropped support for much of its software on any OS other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

From 2020-2022 on, the good days of IT are all over, as Adobe discontinued Flash. Adobe made every effort to close the security holes of its plugin, there still remained security issues, so Adobe failed to solve the security issues despite its best efforts and and decided to discontinue flash. We can at least thank Adobe for its efforts to solve security issues. Edit: Microsoft support for Edge Legacy also ended in 2021. And VMware vCenter for Windows is also discontinued.

Laptops also have become more streamlined, for example with fewer ports. Even the Elitebook now has few ports. Now, I think the laptops looked their best in 2012-2016. Before that it the ProBook and Elitebook looked older, more boxy, and more rugged. Dell business laptops look better than their HP counterparts until 2016. Of HP laptops, the Pavilion looks best. But even in 2016 laptops already had fewer ports than they used to, especially the consumer laptops like the HP Envy.

Many websites also dropped support for Internet Explorer.

Diversity in the IT industry is declining. Linux is too dominant outside the desktop market. Chromium is too dominant. Some formerly Gecko-based browsers like Brave moved o Blink. WebKit browsers are mostly for Mac. Trident is dropped. Not to mention the fall of mobile OS besides Android and iOS.

Not to mention x86 and ARM are too dominant. Itanium was killed due to failure to penetrate the market, largely due to its underwhelming processing performance despite improvements in Itanium 2 and Itanium 9. PowerPC hasn’t penetrated well enough even though it’s called what it’s called for a good reason – it’s Powerful.

Citrix XenServer dropped support for any operating system other than Windows and Linux. Also dropping support for platforms other than x86 and ARM.

But the Glory Days for IT computing were in the like 1995-2003. That was the Golden Age. The following Bruce Springsteen music video “Glory Days” makes a good tribute: