2 Digital transformation history
This chapter covers
- How Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has built the foundation of the IT industry and is now being exploited on the edge.
- Why information technology has shifted back and forth between centralized and decentralized computing.
- What embedded systems are and how they differentiate edge machines.
- The differences between the Internet of Things and edge computing.
This chapter will lay out the history and trends in IT and technology that got us to edge computing. Before we dive deep into “edge” and edge use cases, we should pause to align ourselves on technical trends and address some questions of why IT shifted from single-use machines to mainframes, to personal computers, to clouds, and now a hybrid of cloud and personal computing.