On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote: >> Ever dial into an IBM mainframe at 110 baud from an ASR-33 >> teletype for remote job entry? That was the cloud, too. > > I thought "cloud computing" or "cloud services" was more about buying a > utility service, > or a certain amount of CPU, and how it was delivered is transparent to you.
Right. A large IBM 360 deployment might well represent a significant fraction of the world's commercial computing power. Most companies couldn't afford them, and even those that could feared having them spend any time idle, due to the cost. So instead IBM would maintain them in the datacenter, and rent out time on them. That's when the term "time sharing" entered into the IT world. IBM would bill you for CPU cycles used. Utility computing. How is that intrinsically different from what we're doing today? And sure, delivery was transparent. You might never see or touch the machine, and it didn't matter what phone line you dialed in on. You might well have used Telnet over IP if it had existed back then, but it didn't. The IT world spends a lot of time reinventing technologies that have been around forever. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
