• From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>
• Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:18:02 +1000

I don't think that matches my experience, but it may indeed match others'.

My experience is more of an oscillation of focus/power between the 
person at the terminal being in the driver's seat and the anonymous 
developer at the backend being in the driver's seat. 

So putting punched cards through holes in walls to the mainframe was the 
supremacy of the backend. Then UNIX, shell programming and GNU was 
putting the person at the terminal first. Then back to 2 tier systems 
with RDBMS (backend). Then workstations & networking. Then 
Xenix/minimicros (backend). Then PCs & spreadsheets. Then LAN servers & 
3-tier systems (backend). Then the WWW. Then XML (backend). Now typed 
XML and Web Services and mobile phone apps (backend) .

Maybe there is an investment cycle at work, with alternating investments 
in back-end or front-end systems, to some extent.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • A brief history of how we develop information systems
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>