...AND CHEAPER...:

The foundations of the cloud were laid half a century ago. Books like "The Challenge of the Computer Utility" by Douglas F. Parkhill, published in 1966, noted that computers were getting powerful enough to provide information and services at scale to ordinary people, but that the machinery was so big and expensive that it would have to be remotely accessed. Utility computing was so named because it saw computing becoming as universal as power and water, delivered on demand and charged for in much the same way. In particular, people would no more need to run their own computing systems as they would own their own power generators or drill their own wells.

At the same time, two other fundamental drivers for the cloud began to condense. Future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore coined his eponymous law, saying in effect that integrated circuit technology would double computing power every two years or so. Meanwhile, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in the US and Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory independently invented packet switched networking--a much more robust, efficient, and flexible way of moving data through a common infrastructure than permanent connections of telephone-style switched circuits could manage.

In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs led the creation of Unix and the C programming language--the first credible pieces of system software designed to be easily run on a variety of platforms. Combined with open networking standards developed for ARPANET by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and friends, the lining of the cloud had begun to coalesce in earnest.

Over the next two decades, the invention and popularisation of DSL (another Bell Labs marvel) and the mass-market success of Windows 95 (which supported TCP/IP) spurred the arrival of commercial ISPs, while early deployments of grid computing and application service providers (ASPs) showcased the benefits that might be had from cloud-like thinking.

Then, quite suddenly at the end of the 20th century, everything clicked into place. The technology was just about there, and the economies of scale provided by data centres were once again returning the advantage to large, centralised computing. It was time to go... to the cloud!

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