If one goes back to the early days of the R&D on time sharing, the mid sixties to the mid seventies; all the business forecasts were for "computer utlities" that would service all our needs just like electric utilities. There all these papers about how how the president of a company could run the whole company from his office and eliminate most of middle management. Literally hundreds of such papers which one can still look up in various management journals and conferences. It really sounded a lot like the cloud papers today. There were also papers on problems with this concept which are also worth looking up because they are some of the same problems the cloud presents. The cloud itself will not cure many of the problems we face. Not only have most of us become our own Secretary but we have to waste a lot of time maintaining our computers and upgrading them to meet growing hardware capacity demands and rapid changes in software interfaces including operating systems. 1. Re: Historical Origins of the Cloud (Lovaas,Steven)
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:21:44 +0000 From: "Lovaas,Steven" <Steven.Lovaas@ColoState.EDU> To: Trevor Croker <tcroker@vt.edu> Cc: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Historical Origins of the Cloud Message-ID: <152B804B-1AAC-448F-9838-5CF2D81D6000@ColoState.EDU> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Trevor,
From the early days of what Cisco called Internetwork Design, it's always been necessary to focus on a particular network or group of networks, abstracting the large groups of other networks and the backbone connecting networks. In some science disciplines, this kind of intermediate process/infrastructure abstraction has humorously been referenced with cartoons: "...and then magic happens", etc.
The graphic tool of choice for network designers has been Visio, since long before Microsoft bought it and incorporated it into the Office suite. Visio always had some sort of cloud icon along with all the routers, switches and servers, and the joke was that every good network diagram had to have a cloud in it somewhere...
Eventually, the cloud icon was mostly used to represent the "capital I" Internet, as that thing that our network design cannot control but which our traffic has to traverse. I thought it was funny when, in an effort to update many of the older line-art Visio icons, the artists gave us a dark grey cloud, apparently swollen with rain and threatening to ruin our picnic. Not inappropriate, from a security guy's perspective :)
Steve Lovaas Colorado State University please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com do not use @njit.edu if you are not
*at njit (no more forwarding) Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff *