[Air-L] Historical Origins of the Cloud

[Lovaas,Steven]

Trevor,

>From the early days of what Cisco called Internetwork Design, it's always been necessary to focus on a particular network or group of networks, abstracting the large groups of other networks and the backbone connecting networks. In some science disciplines, this kind of intermediate process/infrastructure abstraction has humorously been referenced with cartoons: "...and then magic happens", etc.

The graphic tool of choice for network designers has been Visio, since long before Microsoft bought it and incorporated it into the Office suite. Visio always had some sort of cloud icon along with all the routers, switches and servers, and the joke was that every good network diagram had to have a cloud in it somewhere...

Eventually, the cloud icon was mostly used to represent the "capital I" Internet, as that thing that our network design cannot control but which our traffic has to traverse. I thought it was funny when, in an effort to update many of the older line-art Visio icons, the artists gave us a dark grey cloud, apparently swollen with rain and threatening to ruin our picnic. Not inappropriate, from a security guy's perspective :)

Steve Lovaas
Colorado State University

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 23, 2013, at 3:32 PM, "Trevor Croker" <tcroker at vt.edu> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am currently trying to track down the historical origin of the term
> "cloud computing." So far, I have only come across speculation that the
> cloud imagery was used in computer textbooks and slowly adopted into the
> computing lexicon.
> 
> Any suggested resources or guidance would be very much appreciated.
> 
> Best,
> Trevor Croker
> PhD Candidate in the Science and Technology Studies Program at Virginia
> Tech
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