With the fall of Windows and the rise of Linux, Computer Science is gradually crawling back to its most rightful community - engineers, scientists, physicists, mathematicians...

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.