Greybeards - has it always been like this?

OK really not trying to date myself here but mu first computer had a whopping 4K of RAM. We used 300 baud modems to connect to bulletin boards. There was not internet. Heck there wasn't even CompuServe or AOL yet. So, after several decades of using computers I have seen quite a lot of "progression" Computers were heavy and clunky and sloooooooooooow. The OS was on a ROM chip and would take like 5-10 minutes just to boot. Then CPUs started to become more powerful and the advent of Windows caused a huge shift in the IT industry. More and more companies were adopting it and this required support because no one really knew how it worked under the hood. Enter "The Computer Guy". Usually, one guy was responsible for the entire office staying connected and working. Networks were mostly all Coax, and everything was connected to a hub. Then we started moving to Cat style connections and soon switches started to become more affordable. Networks were faster and more reliable. Segmenting networks on a managed switch improved security and performance as well. This was all fuel for the next phaze which was the internet age. EVERYTHING was now going online. The best part was that every business had the same resources that every other business had to create a website. Sure Coca-Cola could afford better web designers but the tools were all there for anyone to use. Websites were basic and more about functionality rather than flash and pizzazz. Quite different now. This all led up to the dot com era or as we like to call it the dot bomb. Nothing blew up in people's faces faster. Around the same time we had the Y2K scare. I remember scrambling to get all the computers in the office updated so we could remain operational. I was on call on NYE that year. Turned out to be a big to do about nothing. Nothing happened to my office computers or the servers. We were fine. When the dot bomb happened, many found themselves out of work, including me. It was really hard to find anything at that time. I landed on my feet and was supporting hedge funds for a while. That lasted until 2008 when the market crashed, and I watched as one of the hedge funds I supported lost 10 Million Dollars in a morning. It was not a good day. No one in my office had any work to do and at least half of the people in my office got laid off. I did, however, learn some new valuable skills like virtualization and storage. This led to the next shift for me. I started to focus on Citrix, VMWare and all kinds of storage. Around this time internet was becoming much faster. Home connections were now up to 1Gb. That was fuel for the next big shift - The cloud. Everything at that time was "moving to the cloud" or "cloud-based services". This was a real leap of faith for many companies that were reluctant to move their private and confidential data to a "public" cloud space. However, this did allow for greater agility and expansion but this came at a cost. Things continued to progress and we saw things moving towards containerization. This was another fascinating idea and many bought into it. I remember being introduced to it and thinking that this was the future. While many have moved in that direction, it still remains widely misunderstood, which is sad. Now, I see a big future in IAM and security. With ransomware running rampant, companies are worried about an attack. Personally, I have moved more towards the backup, disaster recovery and business continuity realm. It's all part of the same thing, though, preventing a disaster or recovering from one. IF I was going to recommend something to a new IT person today it would be to choose something along these lines. Businesses are very sensitive to being the victim of a ransomware attack and most likely have already experienced something. The IT world is ever evolving and now the direction is moving towards AI, however you still need the infrastructure behind it and security is even more paramount. I honestly feel that security, business continuity is where it is at right now. That may change, and it certainly will but how fast remains to be seen.