I disagree, I think the fluke was the era in which we didn't have enough work to do for CPU/GPU to be at 100% 24/7. Think of this like leaving money on the table: compute should always be useful, why aren't those cores pegged to max all the time?
I think it was literally lack of imagination. We were like "well, I automated most of the paper pushing we used to do in the office, guess my job is done!" and this occupied 0.001% of a computer's time. We invented all sorts of ways for people to only pay for that tiny slice of active time (serverless, async web frameworks, etc).
Now we're in an era where we can actually use the computers we've built. I don't think we're going back
I think it was literally lack of imagination. We were like "well, I automated most of the paper pushing we used to do in the office, guess my job is done!" and this occupied 0.001% of a computer's time. We invented all sorts of ways for people to only pay for that tiny slice of active time (serverless, async web frameworks, etc).
Now we're in an era where we can actually use the computers we've built. I don't think we're going back