In the early 1990s, I was working for ICL – the once and former poster child for UK IT – trying to sell big old mainframes running an operating system called VME (which stood for “virtual machine environment” – remember that, it becomes important later on…).

It wasn’t an entirely successful venture, given that most of the world was moving to mid-range Unix servers and proliferating these cheaper boxes around every department of the organisation.

At the time, I would occasionally come across an IBM customer still hanging on to their dear old water-cooled mainframes. Water cooling! Honestly. So 1970s. Air conditioning – that was the way forward.

Fast forward to this week when, while hosting a Computing web seminar on energy efficient IT, I find the expert speakers telling viewers to consider, um, consolidating departmental servers to one big central box and, err, investigating water cooling for their datacentres instead of energy-hungry air conditioning.

See? The IT industry is a fast-moving, forward-looking, innovative industry. You heard it here first – water-cooled mainframes are the next big thing. And flares.

Oh, and don’t forget the key technology that is driving the server consolidation trend – virtualisation, whereby multiple applications previously hosted on individual boxes are run in virtual servers on a single box, centralised into what you might call a virtual machine environment.

In the spirit of the IT industry’s love of TLAs (three-letter acronyms), let’s now give this technology its own shorthand – virtualisation, after all, being a bit of mouthful. I suggest that from now on, we call it VME.

Sound familiar?

Sometimes it really is true that the best ideas are the old ones. Of course IT, like anything else, goes in cycles and the trends of yesteryear find new popularity once more. Give it 10 years and we’ll have a dot com boom – Business 5.0, perhaps.

Can anyone else think of examples of old technologies and trends that are - or should be - making a renaissance today?

Here’s another one for the real nostalgists – the ICL One-per-desk (OPD), but with a voice over IP interface. It would work…

An OPD yesterday. Or in 1984.