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“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
by a-priori 12y ago
“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, speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961
(As quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing)
- hga 12y agoAlthough that was no doubt in part due to the extreme expense of computers then. He said that 4 years before Moore published his famous Moore's Law, which many refused to believe for decades, in a period when computers were transitioning from vaccume tubes to transitors, which cost many hundreds of dollars when adjusted for inflation, and probably still when they were shipped with serial numbers. And of course memory was still made by hand out of magnetic cores. Multics was the result of this vision of McCarty and others at MIT, hence its strong focus on security.