IT is old enough now to see itself repeating itself. It is also old enough for a lot of us not to remember a lot of it and benefit from the history lessons. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
One particular example that made me smile was VMWare talking about Lifecycle Manager the ability to use virtualisation to create resources and monitor them and allow you to assign cost metrics. This has sort of thing has been done before and you can see the mainframe guys just nodding sagely.
Sometimes it is the just the economics of the time that make certain techniques more or less relevant. We exploded into distributed computing and despite the total immaturity of the platform it thrived because of the economics. In a lot of enterprises they are trying to rebuild/reinvent the mainframe again; just not on rare proprietary hardware and software.
It'd be nice to have the time to explore more history of I.T. to find inspiration to tackle modern problems. For example, I am sure those mainframe folk will know all the complexities and difficulties of centralised resources (disk, network, CPU etc.) being cross charged to different departments by usage (peak and off peak etc.).
Many of Leonardo da Vinci's designs could not be realised during his time because the materials or manufacturing had not advanced enough. We can apply some new technologies to the old ambitions. Once upon a time centralised mainframes were great, but it was troubled by being such a vast expense the entire company would have to be on board to justify its cost. Today, the economics of hardware, software, datacentre space and management are different. Today we can build dedicated grids or ones that scavenge idle desktop CPU cycles. We can build very large servers for virtualisation or lots of little ones to allow for more autonomy of the business units. We can have DAS, NAS or SAN. We are even seeing more and more "cloud" technologies like Amazon's S3 or EC2 creeping into the equation.
So what problems did they have in the past that feel similar to the ones we have today? How did they solve them, and how would modern evolutions topple the equations toward a much more favourable result today?