say what cloud?

Had an interesting talk with my father today about cloud based processing and "the cloud" in general. He is a retired computer person, who was working in the industry back in the 1960s through to the early 2000s.

Goes something like this.

Before, we had computers that were stand alone devices. I might have one, you might have one. We all, perhaps, might have had one.

Then, we started to build networks which could link one computer to another computer within a building. Files could be shared, etc etc.

Diagramming the connections between different computers was easy. A symbol could be used to represent each computer, and another for a router, and lines could be drawn to illustrate the connections between them.

Enter the Internet in its infancy as it became more than a research project.  Now the network diagrams became more difficult to draw. The local ones would be relatively unchanged. Mapping out how things moved from a local network to the Internet hub was easy as well, but beyond that? Tricky. Mapping data leaving the net was easy as well. But in between? Tricky.

So, on the whiteboard would appear the following. A map of the local network, a map of the end result, and a single word. That word is network. And it was surrounded by a "thought bubble" that was cloud shaped.

That's it. That is the cloud. Nothing new here.

When you use cloud based storage or software, you are essentially trusting that another company has your best interests at heart. That they won't do anything with your stuff. That they will even exist when you need them. You better encrypt it before you store it, or it is open for viewing.

Ironically, your fancy pants computer has become effectively an expensive terminal using someone else's big computer (or network farm). Just like in the old mainframe days of the 1980s.