
Origins of cloud computing - aril
http://oncloudblog.com/origin-of-cloud-computing/
======
dalke
Personally, I was expecting more about how grid computing and ASPs were
important to the origin of cloud computing. The historical perspective goes
from the 1960s the early 2000s, and thus skips everything in between. For more
of that history, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing)
.

Quoting from the oncloudblog article:

> In practice, it wasn’t until much after when cloud computing became
> mainstream when companies such as Salesforce.com pioneered the delivery of
> enterprise systems. Salesforce delivered their software by using a new
> approach, instead of charging customers to buy a software license upfront,
> they would charge through a monthly subscription model.

New approach? What about (as the Wikipedia article points out) InsyncQ? From
[https://web.archive.org/web/20000817055724/http://www.insynq...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000817055724/http://www.insynq.com/Products_and_Services.html)
you can see how it's a charges a monthly fee for access to software for
running a business like the "big guys". Note that that page is from 5 years
before Salesforce 'pioneered' this approach.

InsyncQ was an ASP. From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_service_provider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_service_provider)
I see:

> [ASP] services were more comparable to in-house hosting than to true multi-
> tenant SaaS solutions like Salesforce.com.

Thus, it's not the monthly subscription model which was the new approach for
Salesforce.

You'll notice that the Wikipedia articles for "utility computing",
"application service provider" and "grid computing" all credit the same early
1960s inspiration/precursors. It's very unlikely that they all had independent
trajectories, so I don't see why they should be left out of any piece on the
origin of cloud computing.

While there are any number of pieces on how "cloud" is different from the
"ASP", "grid", or "utility" model, the fact is that "cloud" now encompasses
all of those definitions, which means we have to look earlier, before the term
'cloud' was coined in this context, to see if something was a cloud system
already even in the 1990s.

