I’ve said many times that the information technology industry is second only to Hollywood in its ability to hype itself. IT can be jazzy, cool; it can spark jealousy, too. Having the latest and the greatest was a major factor in getting businesses and other organizations to adopt computer systems in their early days. In some ways, things haven’t changed much.
Today, there’s much hype around an idea called cloud computing. Wikipedia defines the cloud — a metaphor for the idea and the way it is often graphically depicted — as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.” Cloud computing shares some concepts but also has differences with so-called grid computing, utility computing, and autonomic computing, but all of these styles have in common the notion that computing power can be provided more easily and at lower cost than traditional forms of delivery.
At least that’s the pitch from cloud providers such as IBM, Sun, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. To listen to them, without the benefit of historical context, it would appear they have come across a brand new idea of how to organize and deliver computing power to organizations and the people in them.
As early as 1960, noted computer scientist and Turing Award winner John McCarthy was talking about how computational power would someday be organized as a “public utility.” From that time and for much of the 1970s, providers such as IBM, General Electric, and Control Data offered time sharing on their computers in order to lower the cost of computing to their customers.