A brief history of cloud computing

In the 1950s the word “cloud” still referred to a visible mass of condensate water vapour, floating in the atmosphere!

What we know as Cloud computing, has historically evolved through a number of phases. Grid and utility computing, application service provision (ASP), and Software as a Service (SaaS) are just a few of the steps it took to get to today’s form of cloud computing. The story and the concept to eventually deliver cloud computing is dated back in the 1950s.

Cloud computing looks back on a gradual evolution that started with mainframe computing.
Multiple users were capable of accessing a central computer through terminals, whose only function was to provide access to the mainframe. Back then the cost involved for acquiring computers was enormous compared to today. So sharing computing resources was the only way to give a number of users’ access to computing power. Providing shared access to a single resource was the solution that made economic sense for this, at that time, sophisticated piece of technology.

Back then J.C.R. Licklider, the person who was majorly involved in building and developing the ARPANET in 1969, had the idea to build an “intergalactic computer network”. The basic idea was to enable every single human on the face of earth to be able to interconnect to anyone else; programs being able to run on remote resources and data being shared between anyone accessing the “intergalactic network”.

Product and Marketing Director at AMD, Margaret Lewis said:

It is a vision that sounds a lot like what we are calling cloud computing today.

While opinions vary, other experts in the cloud vertical do attribute “cloud computing” to another scientist called J. McCarthy, who is responsible for proposing the idea of computation being delivered as a public utility.

Since the late 60s, a number of milestones evolved, with the Web 2.0 concept being one of the latest milestones, but “cloud computing” was not able to develop until advancements were made in increased bandwidth provisioning in the 1990s.

In 2009, as Web 2.0 hit the internet, Google and other companies started offering browser-based enterprise applications. A great example of such a service provided by Big G is Google Apps, which revolutionized the concept of email delivery through a web interface. Until then software applications like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird needed to be physically installed on top of the operating system in use. One of the first milestones in cloud computing history was the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, which is recognized as a pioneer using the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. The services firm paved the way for specialist and mainstream software firms to deliver applications over the internet.

When referring to cloud computing, one can not not mention Amazon Web Services (AWS), who back in 2002 provided the first form of cloud based services, which included computational resources and storage through their product “Amazon Mechanical Turk.” It was later on in 2006 when Amazon hit the jackpot with their EC2 service offering, which allowed everyone to provision computing resources on demand and install their own operating system and software. Amazon can be described as the first widely accessible cloud computing infrastructure service.

Historically, several hurdles needed to be overcome; Cloud computing wouldn’t be possible without technologies such like virtualisation technology having evolved and matured first. 

Jamie Turner, a UK based cloud computing pioneer said once:

Without the maturity of virtualization, the development of universal high-speed bandwidth, and universal software interoperability standards, the cloud wouldn’t be possible. As cloud computing extends its reach beyond a handful of early-adopter Google Docs users, we can only begin to imagine its scope and reach. Pretty much anything can be delivered from the cloud.

Cloud Computing History Timeline

For the ease of consuming large historical data I’ve prepared a timeline.