Detail History of Cloud Computing
Over time as the technology and business environments had progressed, the status quo of cloud computing has changed. What was known as cloud computing long ago was the same in principle, but the uses in information today have changed by an immense degree.
But there is no doubt that this type of processing power is indeed becoming more prevalent by larger companies that have an almost unquenchable thirst for the ability to process tasks such as crunching numbers and providing users with Web 2.0 functionality. More and more information is out there in the digital realm and there is so much of it that needs to be organized in ways that we can fully understand it and use to our advantage.
The beginning of what is known as the concept of cloud computing can be traced back to the mainframe days of the 1960s when the idea of “utility computing” was coined by MIT computer scientist and Turing award winner John McCarthy. Utility computing ended up becoming something of a big business for companies such as IBM. The concept was simple: that computing power could be broken down as a metered service for businesses much like how the power and telephone companies operated for their customers.
Indeed, it was an article “The Computers of Tomorrow” for the Atlantic Monthly in May of 1964 where author Martin Greenberger pointed out the concept that “advanced arithmetical machines of the future” were now being used not only institutionally for scientific calculation and research but for business functions such as accounting and inventory. He envisioned in his piece a future in which computers would be universal almost like the major power companies running wires everywhere in due time.
The “information utility” would soon rise, but the question was, would it become regulated like the power industry or be a private entity in and of itself? IBM of course, saw the potential for enormous profit to be made in this type of business and took the reigns in providing computing services to companies for top dollar. What IBM was providing with utility computing could be referred to almost as server rental in allowing, for a fee, large organizations (such as banks for example) access to computing power from their gigantic mainframes; often too expensive, large and complicated for most businesses to acquire and operate on their own.
There was another component to the idea of utility computing that allowed interest to wane during the rise of the personal computer. The technical limitations on bandwidth as well as disk space were a huge constraint on what could have been. The infrastructure for this type of technology was simply not in place as of yet for cloud computation to take the limelight, although the use of rented mainframe processing still proved to be profitable for quite some time.
It was in the late 1990s that companies such as Sun Microsystems began touting what seemed at the time the marketing concept that “the network is the computer”. Or the idea that Oracle founder Larry Ellison (who later invested in Salesforce.com) had for terminal machines that would cost less than $300. These ideas were indeed profound, but they never really took off as consumers were looking for more complete personal computer solutions that had, for example, some storage capacity available.
The personal computer as we understand it today is no dummy terminal. In fact, the rise of the Internet beginning in the mid-90s changed how computers could be used and how information could be disseminated. With the idea of utility computing long gone, companies such as Amazon began to harness the power of server farms to offer a gaggle of products to would-be buyers.
In fact, despite popular belief, Amazon is far from being a company that specializes in retail. Its contributions to cloud computing will be discussed later in a profile of companies using cloud technology, but it is clear to any IT professional that Amazon is first and foremost a company built on the foundations of technical innovation beginning especially after the dot-com bubble era.
Interestingly, the motives behind most dot-com companies at that time were not based on profit but on traffic. Traffic was mistakenly seen at the time as some kind of cash flow to investors of dot-com companies.
This in turn led to a lot of investment into infrastructure. That included fiber optic backbones and building up what was known as the “last mile”, the final distances that were in people’s homes and hopefully to these dot-com companies, ultimately their wallets. The idea of indexing the internet and the rise of first Yahoo, and then Google, has shown us how plugging in to a vast network of knowledge was somewhat of a precursor to the interactivity that we can enjoy today with cloud computing. But search was really where the first version of cloud computing as we know it began.
Whether it is for business or just for fun, these search engines were the dawn of the organization of vast amounts of information that existed on servers around the world. Although today the concept of search engines seem very basic it took many years before the founders of Yahoo came up with a way to easily navigate the Internet.
But Yahoo was the tip of the iceberg, as soon the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, found a faster and better way to index the Internet. Before long even Yahoo was licensing the technology for a time before Google went public.
The rise of Google brought a massive investment in huge server farms which would then lead to the vast array of applications and Web 2.0 features that Google now offers as a titan of the industry, probably the cornerstone of what cloud computing is today and leaving software and network companies such as Novell and Microsoft in the dust trying to find their way.
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