Intro To Cloud Computing History

Cloud computing is pretty much all over the news and being mentioned by practically every business that has to work with networking & computing. However, most people have no clue what cloud computing is or why it is treated as so important to various industries. Well, there is a very short definition that is provided by technical writer Wesley Chai: "Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet". Over the internet, you can get data storage, computing power, networking, and analytics from a company that can host all of the computing infrastructure for you. The cloud symbol being used to represent computing has been a thing since the year 1977 when a cloud symbol was used to represent networking of computers for ARPANET (the first wide-area packet-switched network and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite of communication protocols). In this case, the cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet and the cloud-symbol was used to show a network of electronic devices communicating with one another. The term cloud was officially used to refer to platforms for distributed computing (computing where a software system is shared among multiple computers) as early as 1993 when Apple and AT&T used it to describe Telescript technologies. AT&T described it like this:

You can think of our electronic meeting place as the Cloud. PersonaLink was built from the ground up to give handheld communicators and other devices easy access to a variety of services. [...] Telescript is the revolutionary software technology that makes intelligent assistance possible. Invented by General Magic, AT&T is the first company to harness Telescript, and bring its benefits to people everywhere. [...] Very shortly, anyone with a computer, a personal communicator, or television will be able to use intelligent assistance in the Cloud. And our new meeting place is open, so that anyone, whether individual, entrepreneur, or a multinational company, will be able to offer information, goods, and services.

Andy Hertzfeld, an American innovator and software engineer, did an interview with the tech magazine WIRED on April 1994 to describe Telescript technologies and their distributed programming language:

"The beauty of Telescript ... is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of information and create a sort of a virtual service. No one had conceived that before. The example Jim White [the designer of Telescript, X.400 and ASN.1] uses now is a date-arranging service where a software agent goes to the flower store and orders flowers and then goes to the ticket shop and gets the tickets for the show, and everything is communicated to both parties."

Eventually, other major companies began using cloud computing & offering it to the public so any entrepreneur, company, and individual could take advantage of using computing resources over the internet even if the mobile phone or personal computers they own do not have much computing power on hand. In July of 2002, the tech giant Amazon created a subsidiary called Amazon Web Services. While it launched about nineteen years ago, it did not have cloud computing services on March of 2006. The cloud computing services of Amazon Web Services (or AWS for short) are used to power many of the services owned by Amazon like Wickr (a secure instant messaging company) & NICE (telephone voice recording software). In February of 2010, Microsoft released to the public their own cloud computing platform called Microsoft Azure & in May of 2012, Google produced their own cloud platform called Google Compute Engine for public preview before rolling it out to the public in 2013.