Many people don’t realize this but a lot of the things we consider cutting edge have been available on mainframes for decades - the only real cutting edge part is that we can do it on a consumer’s budget now. Kubernetes for instance has no resource accounting/costing and security is obviously a bolt on, its probably going to take them another decade to get that to where IBM was forty years ago.
In the “golden” days you also spent a lot more effort on getting hardware and software from different vendors to work together. Mechanically, electrically, and in software. People used to joke how ironic it was a MacBook could talk to the alien mothership in Independence Day since Macs couldn’t communicate with anything on Earth - but that joke is no longer true, good job Apple.
Probably the last thing that differs from the “golden” days is the amount of pioneering that goes on. Today you are pretty much limited to whatever the various hardware consortiums feel like producing, or what intel’s roadmap allows, etc. So even if there is some amazing alternative to the von Neumann architecture, your unlikely to see it. The Soviets experimented with ternary based computers for years and it would have loved to see that go further - unfortunately all that got killed off due to one guy’s indiscretion.
In the “golden” days you also spent a lot more effort on getting hardware and software from different vendors to work together. Mechanically, electrically, and in software. People used to joke how ironic it was a MacBook could talk to the alien mothership in Independence Day since Macs couldn’t communicate with anything on Earth - but that joke is no longer true, good job Apple.
Probably the last thing that differs from the “golden” days is the amount of pioneering that goes on. Today you are pretty much limited to whatever the various hardware consortiums feel like producing, or what intel’s roadmap allows, etc. So even if there is some amazing alternative to the von Neumann architecture, your unlikely to see it. The Soviets experimented with ternary based computers for years and it would have loved to see that go further - unfortunately all that got killed off due to one guy’s indiscretion.