--- title: "Echoes" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/26/echoes" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/26/echoes" issue: 26 section: "echoes" description: "Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities" authors: ["Nora Kaplan","Rina Takahashi"] published: 2026-04-27 updated: 2026-04-23 articles: 10 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 26 — Echoes Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities ### The Proposition at 50 - [The Round Trip]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-04-22 · Format: The Proposition at 50 Unplug a 1984 Macintosh from the wall, carry it to another room, plug it back in. Everything still there. The operating system, the graphics, the document you were editing. No connection to maintain. Now try the same experiment with the machine on your desk today. Try the network cable. ### Reaching Backward - [The Bondi Blue Recoil]() — Published 2026-04-22 Functional Bondi Blue iMacs have been climbing resale listings all year. Original Macintosh 128Ks too. The buyers skew young. Vinyl outsold CDs for a third straight year, "retro tech" content crossed 8 billion views, and searches for "analog hobbies" jumped 136% in six months. None of this is nostalgia, exactly. You can't be nostalgic for 1998 if you were born in 2003. ### The Machine Arrives - [Gerry Tuckwell on Spending $1,298 to Watch Uppercase Letters on a Television]() — Published 2026-04-22 *Gerry Tuckwell doesn't exist — but roughly 40,000 people bought an Apple II in its first two years on the market, and most of them weren't engineers, hobbyists, or visionaries. They were people who saw an ad in a magazine, spent the equivalent of $6,900 in today's dollars, and sat down in front of a television set wondering what they'd just done. This is a conversation with one of them — reconstructed from documented details of what the machine actually was, what the ads actually promised, and what early owners actually experienced. Gerry is fictional. The confusion he describes is not.* ### Still Running / Edge Cases - [The Load-Bearing Layer Nobody Talks About]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-04-22 · Format: Still Running / Edge Cases The mainframe was supposed to be gone by now. Stewart Alsop gave it until 1996. The client-server era, the PC era, the cloud era all arrived on schedule, each promising to replace what came before. None did. Seventy-eight percent of enterprises still depend on mainframe infrastructure for revenue. Their persistence says something uncomfortable about the $600 billion in AI cloud infrastructure being built right now. - [Where Will the Thinking Actually Happen?]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-04-22 · Format: Still Running / Edge Cases A flagship phone in 2026 can run a 4-billion-parameter AI model locally. NPUs are shipping in every laptop. The pitch is familiar: intelligence moves to the edge, away from the center. PCs were supposed to do this to mainframes. Mobile was supposed to do it to desktops. Now on-device AI is supposed to do it to the cloud. The economics are real. So is the pattern of what happens next. ### The Longer Thread - **How AI's Future Will Echo the Rise of the PC** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-22 Brookings maps the mainframe-to-PC transition onto AI's current centralization phase, and the structural parallel holds up better than most historical analogies deserve to. The analytical backbone for this issue's theme. - **Apple at 50** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-22 The Computer History Museum's exhibition collects rare prototypes, oral histories, and the original bet that powerful computing belonged in individual hands. The richest public archive available for the anniversary, open through September. - **Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-22 IBM's $5 billion gamble on a compatible family of machines was architecturally correct and nearly fatal anyway. IEEE Spectrum tells the story of how the software side of System/360 almost broke the company that bet everything on it. - **Not Nostalgia. Not Hype. Just Data: Mainframe Trends 2026** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-22 The 2026 Arcati Survey finds 78% of enterprise revenue still running through mainframes. A useful corrective if you assumed the centralization-to-distribution cycle actually completes. - **Today's Internet Still Relies on an ARPANET-Era Protocol** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-22 Steve Crocker invented the RFC process as a UCLA grad student in 1969, mostly to avoid sounding too authoritative. Those provisional decisions became permanent infrastructure. He'd know. ## Other sections in Issue 26 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()