tl;dr version: Computers and disks are a lot cheaper now.
Basically the article boils down to this, what counted as a 'cluster' in 1998 is a single system in 2008, what used to take hundreds of disk drives to store, you can store on 1 today.
Not particularly deep, but useful to think about from time to time. There is a quote, perhaps apocryphal, which says
"There are two ways to solve a problem that would take 1000 computers 10 years to solve. One is to buy a 1000 computers and start crunching the numbers, the other is party for 9 years, use as much of the money as you need to buy the best computer you can at the end of the 9th year, and compute the answer in one day."
The idea that computers get more powerful every year, and that in 10 years they will be more than 1000x more powerful than the ones you would have started with so one can solve the same problem.
Of course they haven't been getting as powerful as quickly as they once were, but the amount of data you can store per disk has continued to outperform.
The point is that if you are designing for the long haul (say 10 yrs from now) you can probably assume a much more powerful compute base and a lot more data storage.
That's not even close to what he's saying - I thought that was actually a rhetorical weakness, to tell the truth.
What he's saying is that the existence of the cloud and library advances such as MapReduce and APIs mean that the bar is lowered, when writing new software, to an extent it's hard even to comprehend.
Every time I get a module from CPAN I still get a shiver down my spine, remembering trying to do new and interesting things in the 80's and early 90's and every single time ending up trying to build a lathe to build a grinder to grind a chisel to hack out my reinvented wheel.
A bit off, but CPAN really hasn't changed all that much. I tried installing a module the other day, something simple like a word stemmer, and got so disgusted that I quit Perl.
Which explains your dismay at using new stuff. I'm 45, too. Fight it.
My point - which, as a 45-year-old programmer, you should have understood - was that modern languages and library repositories make a whole lot of basic work go away, so that we're working at a higher level than was possible in 1985.
> what used to take hundreds of disk drives to store, you can store on 1 today
Though, given that hard drives very much do not obey Moore's Law, a well-designed 1998 solution with hundreds of disks may well have far faster IO than the 2012 one-disk solution.
What really changed is you don't need to use 1998 approach to solve the same problem. A single SSD can beat 50 1998 HDD in terms of IOPS, storage, latency etc. Your PC probably has more RAM now than you had HDD in 1998 and CPU's have almost as much cache a 1998 computer.
PS: A traditional HDD is hard pressed to break 200 IOPS / second cheap SSD's easily 100x you can break 100,000 for well under a grand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS
Basically the article boils down to this, what counted as a 'cluster' in 1998 is a single system in 2008, what used to take hundreds of disk drives to store, you can store on 1 today.
Not particularly deep, but useful to think about from time to time. There is a quote, perhaps apocryphal, which says
"There are two ways to solve a problem that would take 1000 computers 10 years to solve. One is to buy a 1000 computers and start crunching the numbers, the other is party for 9 years, use as much of the money as you need to buy the best computer you can at the end of the 9th year, and compute the answer in one day."
The idea that computers get more powerful every year, and that in 10 years they will be more than 1000x more powerful than the ones you would have started with so one can solve the same problem.
Of course they haven't been getting as powerful as quickly as they once were, but the amount of data you can store per disk has continued to outperform.
The point is that if you are designing for the long haul (say 10 yrs from now) you can probably assume a much more powerful compute base and a lot more data storage.