The Genesis of Cloud Computing: The Pivotal Years (Part 2)

Welcome back! This is Part 2 of a series and we’re continuing our journey of retracing the origin of the term and the idea of cloud computing to understand this elusive and complex concept. If you have not read the very interesting beginnings of cloud computing, you can read Part 1 right here.

Quick recap

As a quick recap, we mentioned that computer scientist John McCarthy’s concept of time-sharing of computers perhaps became the earliest idea of cloud computing, as computers during the 1950s were ginormous, expensive and rather hard to use.

However, with the personal computer revolution about 25 years later, home computers became affordable and people had their own computers to play around with. Hence, time-sharing concept fell out of place, at least temporarily, as we will see later on in this post.

The birth of the term

As personal computers became more and more compact, less and less expensive, yet more powerful Internet devices, Internet companies boomed, offering a multitude of services.

It was in the year 1996, at a time when Netscape’s web browser dominated, inside the offices of Compaq Computer outside Houston, that a small group of technology executives was envisioning the future of the Internet business and was the first to use the term “cloud computing.” The term would not become mainstream until about a decade later.

An important milestone

Three years later, in 1999, one of the first milestones in cloud computing history happened with the arrival of Salesforce.com. It pioneered the concept of offering enterprise services through a simple website application software. This paved the way for Software as a Service (SaaS) and many specialists and mainstream software firms started to develop applications over the Internet.

As people became more connected to the Internet, the need to be mobile while staying connected caused a surge in demand, and production, of Internet-ready mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

A new need and direction

While these compact, pocket-sized computing devices became popular and powerfully useful in connecting online, its miniature size as compared with desktop computers means that hardware-wise it had a lot of limitations.

Hence, while software and applications became increasingly handy, storage devices became a challenge. Even owning several pesky USB drives and memory cards, which addressed that challenge, soon became a hassle.

Even if Dave Winer, a programmer, Silicon Valley pundit and blogger, referred to the Internet as a “cloud” of computers in a 2001 New York Times article, up until now, “cloud” was not yet a buzzword. There were definite hints that this was the direction that computing would end up in a few years. But more on that next time.

In the third and final part of this blog series, we will see how the term was finally coined and used as we know it today. So stay tuned and watch out for the finale of our journey. For now, here’s a look at what we are contributing to the cloud…

Offcloud, your cloud-based download manager

Here at Offcloud, we provide an invaluable cloud-based service to all our users, going above and beyond the simple storage that most places have to offer! We also give our users the opportunity to download instantly from BitTorrent directly into your cloud storage account, fetch cloud data to convert and store for use later on, and even make use of the media you’ve saved while you’re on the go.

You can do all this with a free account, too, giving you the opportunity to really try out the service before deciding to make a financial commitment to a bigger package with extra features! You’ll receive 10GB of storage space and 100 direct download links, so why not give us a go?