It would also be interesting to compare the efforts made then with what it would take today to make as 4004-equivalent. It would certainly be much easier. Anyone in the field armed with the right tools care to hazard a guess?
They could not be created earlier for the same reason why Hollywood could not have been created in the 17th century: there was no motion pictures technology or modern internet distribution channels. But none of that tech has to do with Hollywood.
The engineering complexity of Airbnb is in the ARM SOC and in the GPS constellation, but not in their app.
There are plenty of startups that work on challenging engineering problems (though I'd have to google for the Unicorns who do that).
Even comparing the engineering complexity of what Google does, and what Airbnb, Uber, etc do is impossible. Many large unicorns are doing nothing new, or special. They are only clicking existing technology together. Which means they are very easy to outcompete, too.
Well, it isn't always true that unicorns are easy to outcompete. I could argue that Amazon (not AWS) isn't anything special either. The point of a unicorn isn't to develop complex tech. At scale, these companies are hard to beat.
Nope, I'm talking about engineering complexity.
"I could create Facebook in a weekend!" became such a recurring post on HN that posts about how you really couldn't became cliche, too. Seriously, yes, these "unicorns" really are doing really hard work. In another 30 years maybe you'll be able to turn a crank and produce a unicorn-scale codebase, but we definitely are not there today. Even in the last 5 years a lot of tools have come out to make it noticeably easier.
(Note how I said "hard" work. Whether or not it's valuable is an entirely different discussion. Hate the unicorns all you want, it doesn't make them any easier to engineer. I suspect you may be falling for the "I don't like X so X must have every negative quality" cognitive trap.)
Yes, both are quite easy, as long as you ignore all the parts that make it hard. Like scaling. Lots of things are easy if they don't have to scale.
Scaling is solvable, but it is not solved. If you have to throw money/people at the problem, well, that means it is a problem, right?
Certainly not today's Facebook or Twitter, no. But the initial versions were very simple things. Anyone can make a Facebook or Twitter. Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users. That was what was special, not something technical. Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
Yep.
> Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
Yeah not really. The CAP theorem is going to bite you if you just buy more servers. Twitter suffered huge growing pains as it tried to scale after becoming mainstream--remember the "fail whale?" Facebook completely re-engineered PHP to address performance and scale issues.
Facebook has what, almost a billion and a half users? 500PB of data?
They are likely the largest systems of their kind in a few areas. It has to be more than somewhat difficult.