A friend of mine's father was the head of
Digital[0] in Australia and later sent to Boston after being promoted. I distinctly recall speaking to him in around 1995 regarding Linux. He, along with I believe a large number of commercial Unix vendors, snubbed his nose at Linux suggesting it was a passing fad and would never challenge their "serious" Unix. This is interesting because Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1], then CTO of Digital (before it was acquired by Compaq in 1998, acquired in turn by HP in 2002) certainly did get it... I interviewed him once in Sydney circa '99 and had a good long chat once in Taiwan circa '01 after crossing paths by chance. He was traveling the world proselytizing Linux in shorts and flip-flops, had a firm belief in embedded Linux changing the world (Android[2] wasn't released until nearly a decade later in 2008), but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade). Fast forward 30 years: nobody younger than 40 has practically even heard of the company, Linux is in every household, and the very idea of a commercial Unix a joke.
Furthermore, in perfectly delicious irony, IBM's own modifications to Linux[3] to support the allocation of workloads to its giant server hardware have enabled the popularization of containers, further reducing demands for server equipment, increasing portability between desktop and server environments, and substantially drawing down the cost of provisioning for cloud services - the arch rival to traditional mainframe mentality. Today, in a world awash with dirt cheap and ever-present processing power and storage, as well as recently unimaginable levels of connectivity, we stand almost at the point where the term "server" itself has become an anachronism and consumption-oriented devices draw consumers toward "services" (often as paid for subscriptions).
IMHO some industries which will look nothing like today's version in 30 years' time: food, oil, transport, construction, clothing, health, and education. Carpe diem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)
[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...