Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is all the hype right now, but what does it really mean?
Do you have to sit on the mountains with the computer on the clouds? Or in a plane with your laptop?
Does it work when it is sunny?
To answer these questions let's go back in time...
In the 1950’s, computers were house sized monsters and were called the mainframes. If you wanted to use the power of one of these mainframes you had to connect to it using what was called a terminal. It could connect to multiple users at the same time. This type of setup was called the centralized Local Area Network (LAN).
And if you connected multiple Local Area Networks together, you could create a decentralized Wide Area Network (WAN) that could span across a country.
Starting to see a cloud? Yeah, me neither! Lets continue...
The problem with WAN at this stage was that they couldn’t cross communicate. IBM mainframes would talk to other IBM mainframes, GU with GU. Using WAN as inspiration J.C.R Licklider came up with the idea of Intergalactic Computer Network (Oooooo...) a medium of informational interaction. His work led to the first platform independent computer network called ARPANET that could connect computers of any brand. By the 90’s , this growing network of connected computers boomed to what we know as the Internet.
This was called by the computer engineers as “The Cloud”. Looks more like a cloud now, doesn’t it? But also evolving at the same time were the mainframes itself, they became cheaper, smaller and could be found basically everywhere. There was no longer a need to rely on a terminal, every family could do this with their own computer.