Putting Data First by Everpure Blog Every computing revolution is, at its core, architectural: a fundamental change in the relationship between software or hardware, communications, memory, or data storage. From mainframes to minicomputers and client-server to the cloud, each era reshaped the relationship between these components. Yet through 50 years of these shifts, one relationship has held uncontested: Data existed to serve the application design, and indeed, the computer operating system.