A brief history of time on the origins of the phrase ‘Cloud’
I talk to all sorts of people about cloud computing. Some have heard of it, but few rarely understand it. Even those that work in the IT industry have issues with the basic concepts. In a series of blogs about this subject, we are going to explore what cloud computing really is. Ironically, a lot of us are already using cloud based services, but are doing so without realising it. More of this later, but in the meantime, lets look at where the term of cloud came from…
Why ‘Cloud’?
The term of ‘Cloud’ is used nowadays as a metaphor for the internet, based on a drawing of a cloud to represent the Internet. It originally was used to represent the telephone network!
Below is a simple computer network drawing to illustrate what the Cloud is.
In this example the people on the left are connecting the the web servers on the far right. In order to do this, they are using the Internet, which is represented by a drawing of a Cloud. We use a Cloud to represent all of the networking and firewall infrastructure that we know nothing about. We just know that it’s there and it works. We don’t need to know how it works or what it is. It’s just a ‘Cloud’ of networked devices, otherwise known as the ‘Internet’!
And it’s as simple as that!
So next time you are talking to someone about ‘Cloud’, you can tell them why it’s called that!
Trivia
The first scholarly use of the term ‘Cloud Computing’ was in a 1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa. However, the underlying concept of Cloud Computing can be traced back to the 1960′s when John McCarthy suggested that “Computation may someday be organised as a public utility”. The term of ‘Cloud’ was coined by telecommunications companies in the 1990′s as a demarcation point between infrastructure that belonged to them and infrastructure that belonged to the user.
