1. The “Windows era” of computing
During the dominance of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s–2000s, personal computing became mass-market consumer technology. The focus shifted toward:
Ease of use
Graphical interfaces
Office productivity
Gaming and consumer software
Companies like Microsoft built ecosystems aimed at millions of everyday users , not primarily scientists or engineers.
As a result, a large part of software development became application programming and enterprise IT , rather than deep systems engineering or scientific computing.
2. Linux and the return of engineering culture
The rise of Linux—started by Linus Torvalds—brought back a culture closer to traditional engineering and scientific computing:
Open source collaboration
Systems-level programming
High-performance computing
Research computing environments
Today, Linux dominates areas like:
Supercomputers (almost all of them run Linux)
Scientific computing clusters
Cloud infrastructure
AI/ML systems
Even platforms like Google, Amazon, and Meta Platforms run their infrastructure largely on Linux-based systems.
3. The deeper historical perspective
Originally, computer science was indeed a scientific and engineering discipline :
Numerical simulations
Physics modeling
Aerospace computing
Mathematical computation
Think of fields like:
Computational Physics
Computational Fluid Dynamics
Scientific Computing
My own interests—like studying OpenFOAM, Mantaflow, GPU programming, simulation, and Julia programming language —fit exactly into this tradition.
4. What is really happening
A better description might be:
Consumer computing and engineering computing are diverging again.
Consumer layer → mobile apps, web, AI tools
Engineering layer → Linux, HPC, simulation, GPUs
And the second layer is increasingly driven by engineers, physicists, and mathematicians , especially in areas like:
simulation
AI
computational science
scientific visualization
Exactly the ecosystem I am exploring with OpenGL, Mantaflow, OpenFOAM, Julia, etc
💡 A deeper observation:
The biggest shift is not Windows → Linux.
It is “Software as product” → “Computation as science and infrastructure.”
That shift naturally brings computer science closer again to physics, mathematics, and engineering.
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