When did all start?

Back in the late seventies at Tymshare, a networking company. I always wondered if the network queues were algebraic, and held superposition.

Network flow management was like a graph traversal, back pressure control characters traveling the network backwards, so the congestion uncertainty was real but bounded by network length. That leads down one path, the other was always network traversal grammar. Then pricing was solved, and that gave us a queueing theory over networks. which leads to controlled decision making by a kind of competitive pricing system the neural nets use.

So making very intelligent and canonical (having a structured path to optimum)  decisions about large quantities of data becomes a workable calculus of queues. The combinatial issues solvable by Moore's Law, linux  and Dallas hackers.  Solvable today, if you want to pay the electric bill.