From Floppy Disks to Billions of Users: Why System Design Exists

From Floppy Disks to Billions of Users: Why System Design Exists. 💾👉🌐

Before the Internet, life for developers was surprisingly simple. You wrote a program.

You ran it on your own computer. If it worked - great, you were done.

That was called a Standalone Application. If your friend wanted to use it, you didn’t deploy anything.

You just zipped the file or burned it onto a CD or floppy disk. 💿 They installed it on their machine, and the software used their own CPU, RAM, and storage.

✅ Every user had their own copy. ❌ No sharing. No scale. No complexity. Just one user, one machine, one program.

Then… the Internet arrived. 🌐 At first, it was just a faster way to send files. But very soon, people had a revolutionary idea:

“What if the software stays on MY machine, and users only send requests to it?” Instead of everyone installing the app, users could just send a request using HTTP, and the program would process it and send back a response.

That single machine became known as a Server - because it serves requests. 🛎️

And that’s how Web Applications (websites) were born. Now, one application could serve thousands…

then millions… and even billions of users across the world - all using the same computer resources:

• Same CPU 🧠
• Same memory 💾
• Same disk 💿
• Same network 🌐

One program. Millions of users. 🤯 And that tiny shift from “one user, one computer” to “millions of users, one server” is exactly why System Design became necessary.

Because when scale increases, problems increase. 📈 And system design is about solving those problems.

In my next posts, we’ll break this down slowly and clearly. No confusion. Just real understanding.

Imagine if YouTube ran on just ONE single laptop. 🤔 What do you think would happen first?

• A) It would crash instantly.
• B) It would catch fire.
• C) It would just be incredibly slow.

Let me know your guess in the comments!