The Very Short History of Cloud Computing - Computer Support

You may or may not have heard of cloud computing, but you most definitely will have used it. You probably did a Google search to find this article, for instance, and by doing so accessed Google?s server networks ? in other words, the Google ?cloud?. Increasingly, people are using applications (like Dropbox, and Facebook) over the Internet and storing large amounts of data on virtual servers in these clouds. The following is a short history of what it is and how it has come about.

Free and mobile

Cloud computing allows you to be free of the personal computer as we know it. Instead, all you?ll need is a client machine like an iPad, Kindle or ChromeBook to access the Internet, providing you access to all the computer applications, data and networks you?ll need to function on an everyday basis. You can also access cloud computing through mobile machines like your iPhone, eliminating the need for most computer repair and maintenance and network support, meaning huge savings for businesses.

Utility computing

The era of cloud computing began as an idea uttered by John McCarthy in 1961, when he proposed that computing power could potentially be offered as a utility, much like electricity and telephony. At the time, however, the technology to provide computing power at this scale cheaply and efficiently was not available. Computer technology developed along other lines, and the idea of utility computing was shelved for a time. Personal computers came along, as well as the Internet, and that, as well as the dot.com bubble, laid down a framework for the rise of the cloud.

Dot.com

During the dot.com bubble, a lot of fibre optic and network infrastructure was built in the rush for Internet traffic and, it was hoped, financial gain. Companies like Yahoo! and Google had begun indexing the Internet and were building huge data centres and processing centres to run their servers. However, it was a company called Salesforce, which opened for business in 1999, that brought back the idea of utility computing by offering applications and delivering them via the Internet. While a big success, Salesforce never became as big as the company that followed them, which was none other than Amazon.

Amazon

Amazon was the first company to take advantage of the technologies and networks available and offer what they called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006 and Storage (S3) services. This offered clients access to computer applications and data anywhere they had access to an Internet connection. Clients didn?t need a computer if they had a mobile phone, notebook, or tablet; this represented the maturation of cloud computing from a developing trend into full reality.

Now that we have truly entered the era of cloud computing, our knowledge and development of this new technology is growing and becoming more sophisticated. With much more consumer choice on the market, both in terms of type and configuration of cloud technology, not to mention providers, it?ll be interesting to see what comes out of the clouds next.

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