I got my first computer in the 1980s. It opened doors I didn't know existed.
A BBS. Connecting to a friend's modem to play a game. A dial-up Unix shell. SLIP/PPP with a Linux server. I helped start one of the first ISPs in Texas. Spent eighteen years as CTO of Rackspace. Built software-defined networks at NTT. Then years at Cloudflare, which coincidentally now owns the very phrase that started all of this.
In the 1980s, John Gage at Sun Microsystems said: "The Network is the Computer."
He was right. The computer was never the box. It was every box connected to every other box.
I built my whole career on that idea.
Now it's happening again.
The real power of artificial intelligence isn't the model. It's AI agents with tools, memory, and the ability to call other models. Intelligence that lives in the coordination, not the container.
The Agents are the Computer.™
John Engates writes about agentic AI, infrastructure, and the history of the Internet at exagentica.ai.