4 ms·

To me, "cloud" is the growing phenomenon of removing the need for individuals and organizations to own their own hardware. That's quite different from the exist

• sodomizer 14y ago
  You mean, sort of like how we all used to log on to mainframes, or rent Linux accounts from our webhosts?
  • scott_s 14y ago
    Yes, sort of. But the scale at which it is happening is not like that. Even a small company still owned that mainframe, and physically stored it onsite. And that Linux account on your webhost wasn't quite as capable as a computer you could own - you couldn't, for example, spin up 10,000 of them and create an ad-hoc cluster to run your giant MPI application. Organizations will start viewing computers as a utility they subscribe to, rather than something they own. Should we buy another server, or just rent them through Amazon? In the future, I think that fewer organizations will own hardware - to the extent that it will change the hardware market completely.
• alberich 14y ago
  Actually "cloud" can be traced to relatively old ideas like utility computing. It just was not very feasible back then. EDIT: "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry." (John McCarthy, 1961)
  • scott_s 14y ago
    The idea may be old, but what's new is that it's becoming possible.