Computing has grown through the years in various paradigms driven by the evolution of our needs. It started with the raw need to compute. During the Second World War, two things that required incredible computation were Ballistics trajectory and decryption. The US and UK defence departments used to hire rooms full of women to calculate ballistics trajectory. They wanted this computation to take place faster. Alan Turing was tasked with breaking the Enigma.What was needed was the ability to calculate faster and faster. After the invention of the transistor in 1948, calculations could be done at the speed of light. This dovetailed into a race to build supercomputers. This was the first computing paradigm — Computation for the sake of it.

In the 1960s and 70s, the next great leap arrived in the form of the database. Everything was turned into a database and this gave us companies like Oracle and SAP. There was so much compute available, there was a need to organise the data such that proper analysis could be performed on it.Then came the networking paradigm, first to build at-scale networks within organisations which saw companies like CISCO rise. Then in the 90s, a protocol developed at CERN called the World Wide Web turned a DARPA project into the Internet.The first 10 years of this millennium were spent combining the power of the…