GridWhale and a Brief History of Computing

In this presentation I focus on the architectural changes that have happened over the last 50 years. From mainframes to modern web apps, the way we write programs has evolved as computing resources have increased.

The PC revolution happened because cheap microprocessors allowed for a computer on every desktop and in every home. The deployment of broadband facilitated the rise of the web era, and the ever-decreasing cost of disk drives enabled users to have gigabytes of free storage.

Each of these transitions changed the way we write programs. A terminal-based mainframe app is very different from a modern, full-stack, microservice-based, multi-framework web application.

As datacenter compute power increases, programming architectures continue to evolve. Serverless paradigms, from AWS Lambda to hosted no-code/lo-code platforms like Bubble.io, are rapidly displacing older systems.

GridWhale pushes this architecture further. It integrates UI, business logic, and persistence in a single app development environment (like Bubble.io), but it does it with real code (like AWS Lambda), so you’re not constrained by a limited set of building blocks. The result is an app platform that is simple to use, flexible enough for any purpose, and automatically scalable.

About: I’m George Moromisato, a software engineer building GridWhale, a new cloud-computing platform. Every once in a while, I’ll post an update about its development. Interested in helping out? Write to me: contact@kronosaur.com.