>But to answer your question if we would have been stuck with 1992 technology the internet would have evolved differently, and mainframes would play a much bigger role, to the point that your desktop computer would be just a thin client, running the latest amazing software accelerated by mainframe computers. You would submit jobs from your computer, the mainframe would calculate it and get back to you.

We're kind of getting back to this in a roundabout way, with more and more programs and services being run as web applications in a browser, or otherwise being inseparably tied into cloud technology/storage (looking at you, Adobe.)

With the advent of AI tools that require significant GPU hardware to run there may actually be a legitimate basis for it, but in general it just seems an excuse for companies to have their own tightly-controlled ecosystem which can be continually monetized and exploited.