A Cloudy History

Jean Jennings, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman with ENIAC computer, 1946.

The gap between the physical reality of the cloud, and what we can see of it, between the idea of the cloud and the name that we give it — “ cloud ” — is a rich site for analysis. While consumers typically imagine “the cloud” as a new digital technology that arrived in 2010 – 2011, with the introduction of products such as iCloud or Amazon Cloud Player, perhaps the most surprising thing about the cloud is how old it is. Seb Franklin has identified a 1922 design for predicting weather using a grid of “ computers ” (i.e., human mathematicians) connected by telegraphs. AT&T launched the “electronic ‘skyway’” — a series of microwave relay stations — in 1951, in conjunction with the first cross-country television network. And engineers at least as early as 1970 used the symbol of a cloud to represent any unspecifiable or unpredictable network, whether telephone network or Internet.

— Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud

A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the marketing term)

The history of the Cloud is somewhat unclear ... cloudy, even [ok sorry]. An article published by MIT Technology Review in 2011, titled Who Coined ‘Cloud Computing’?, traced the coinage of the term “cloud computing” back to a May 1997 US PTO trademark application and, by contacting the founder of the now-defunct startup that applied for the trademark (NetCentric), unearthed the story of the first known mention of the now ubiquitous phrase. The startup founder, Sean O’Sullivan, was in negotiations with Compaq regarding a potential $5 million investment into O’Sullivan’s business plan to have NetCentric’s software platform enable ISPs to “ISPs to implement and bill for dozens, and ultimately thousands, of “cloud computing-enabled applications,” according to the plan.”

In their plans, the duo predicted technology trends that would take more than a decade to unfold. Copies of NetCentric’s business plan contain an imaginary bill for “the total e-purchases” of one “George Favaloro,” including $18.50 for 37 minutes of video conferencing and $4.95 for 253 megabytes of Internet storage (as well as $3.95 to view a Mike Tyson fight).

George Favaloro was a Compaq marketing executive who “had recently been chosen to a lead a new Internet services group” at Compaq. Favoloro’s internal memo at Compaq, titled Internet Solutions Division Strategy for Cloud Computing, is dated November 14, 1996 and is ostensibly the earliest known mention of the phrase “cloud computing.”

From the memo: “The emergence of the Internet is driving the migration of communication and collaboration applications into the Internet “cloud” (e.g., telephony, fax).”

While there’s some uncertainty about which of two men actually originated the phrase, “Both agree that ‘cloud computing’ was born as a marketing term.”

Ten years after O’Sullivan and Favoloro’s meetings in Compaq’s Houston office in 1996, Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Google) would make the first public mention of “cloud” and “cloud computing” in a modern, still-relevant context (as in, not “e.g., telephony, fax”) at a 2006 industry conference:

Eric Schmidt: What's interesting [now] is that there is an emergent new model, and you all are here because you are part of that new model. I don't think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a "cloud" somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn't matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you – or new devices still to be developed – you can get access to the cloud. There are a number of companies that have benefited from that. Obviously, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon come to mind. The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers. ... Eric Schmidt: And so what's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising.

...

Eric: I think, if you think about it, all of the companies in the search space are benefiting from this conversion I was talking about earlier, to this new cloud model where people are living in more and more online.

Despite these comments being the first well-known, modern uses of the term, it should be noted that Amazon Web Services, “Launched in July 2002”, had been in existence for a little more than four years prior to Schmidt’s interview, although it was only in 2006 that AWS launched S3 and EC2 (in July and August, respectively).

A Cloudy History

A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the marketing term)

A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the idea)