Raining on the Cloud Parade

Clouds are nebulous, fuzzy-looking, fluffy things that cause airplane pilots grief since they can’t see what’s in them.

If I were above a cloud and throw things into it, the things will fall and I can’t see where they went.

So do I really want my important files, software and music I paid for stored in clouds?

Although, I can see the appeal of this type of service, both for consumers and support personnel alike.

Using Cloud Computing, one can log in from anywhere, using any interface, whether or not one is at home, at work, or at a friend’s house.

Both the software that one has signed up for and the data that one has stored in The Cloud would be available after logging in. For the most part, it wouldn’t matter which version of operating system is on the machine in front of the logged-in user, for the Cloud Service would ideally be indifferent to the user interface (i.e. Windows v Mac v Mobile Phone and Chrome v Firefox v Internet Explorer).

For systems administrators, this would be a benefit too – since The Cloud computing devices would be linked together, acting as one big computer, and system patches and hardware upgrades would be centrally-controlled. This means no more help-desk calls from the end-users trying to figure out why a given software package failed to run on the local PC/laptop after installing “other software” or after installing new hardware drivers.

But, for the younguns out there in cyber-cyberland, this isn’t a brand new, out-of-the-box idea…

I humbly present you some the concepts that were floating on clouds of their own about, o, let’s say, 46 years now:

Oldspeak: “mainframe computer” (Newspeak: “The Cloud“) A thing that stored all the data and ran all the software from a far, far away place… one never had to install anything to make this work, never had to troubleshoot the drivers/hardware incompatibilities, and best of all, never had to run virus scanning software on it since the sysadmins did that somewhere, wherever they hid during daylight hours
^^^ OLD
^^^ NEW

Oldspeak: “dumb/text terminals” (Newspeak: “Web Browser“) Places where one would log into the system and have access to all one’s files and programs – these didn’t have any “intelligence” built into them, as they only provided a way into “The Cloud”
^^^ OLD

^^^ NEW
Oldspeak: “CICS – Customer Information Control System” (“Newspeak: “HTTP” or “Hypertext Transfer Protocol”) A server (or protocol in this case) that controls data flow between the one’s self and “The Cloud”, organising the data and program flow even though the server doesn’t have complete and full control of the environment (like programs do when they are running on a local PC/laptop/mobile phone)
^^^ OLD

^^^ NEW