To truly leverage the power of cloud development, it is necessary to understand what The Cloud is and where it came from.

What is the Cloud?

The Cloud is the next evolution of remote services. Cloud Services are any information technology services executed outside of your network infrastructure. These services accumulatively are referred to as The Cloud.

History of the Cloud:

The Cloud is not a new concept. Similar networks or “universes” of computers were predicted by Von Neumann and Barracelli during the creation of the first modern computer in 1953. These “universes” were better defined in McCarthy’s and Licklider’s Grid Computing predictions in the 60s. The modern vision of the cloud began its incubation in 1997 on the heels of Web 1.0. Surprisingly, Microsoft accelerated the development of this open communication strategy when it proposed SOAP in 1999 and joined the SOAP alliance in 2000. This incubation was complete in early 2008 with the publication of Web 2.0 and the wide spread adoption of Software as a Service.

From: Dev Revival
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Full Text Timeline:

The following is a text representation of the timeline above, just in case you have difficulty reading the graphical timeline. Feel free to email me if you would like a Visio copy of the timeline above.

1953: The fathers of modern computing and artificial intelligence: Von Neumann and Barracelli predicted a universe in which machines would communicate and cooperate to accomplish tasks.

1960: John McCarthy predicted Grid Computing: “computation may someday be organized like a public utility”

Early 60’s: Licklider predicted The Cloud: He dreamed of a global network everyone could plug into sharing programs and data.

1969: ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) built on McCarthy’s and Licklider’s visions

1975: EDI created as the first official data standard

Early 1990s: Grid computing gains popularity. Computers begin to link on centralized networks and share data.

1994: Web goes mainstream – Web 1.0

1997: HTML becomes a standard

1998: XML Created

1999: SalesForce.com offers CRM software in an “On Demand” program over the web.

Dec. 1999: Microsoft expanded this “Software as a Service” Concept with their proposal for SOAP

Mid 2000: Microsoft adds SOAP support to VB6

Fall 2000: WSDL and UDDI announced

End of 2000: MSFT, IBM, Sun, Oracle, and HP created an alliance for SOAP

Sep. 2001: Seti@Home achieves 23.37 sustained Teraflops on 3 MM PCs

2002: Amazon releases Mechanical Turk: Storage, computation, and intelligence on remote servers

2002: .Net 1.0 released with support for web services

2004: .Net 1.1 released adding stability to web services

2006: Amazon launches EC2 Elastic Cloud Computing: Companies can rent computers to run their apps

2006: .Net 3.0 Adds WCF simplifying web service communication and development

2007: Distributed peer to peer networks like BitTorrent and Skype take hold with developers. Microsoft, Google, IBM, and a number of universities initiated Cloud Computer research projects.

2008: Web 2.0 goes mainstream. Everyone from Microsoft to Google offer enterprise scale apps over the browser. The first cloud computing events start to pop up all over the country. Virualization hits it stride.

About the author:
Brian Blanchard is a geek by trade with a deep understanding of development and IT leadership. Having lead over 100 IT initiative in the past 11 years, he has seen personally experienced many of the evolutions of the The Cloud. He leverages this experienced to aid companies in the integration of The Cloud into their corporate IT strategies to reduce IT expenditures and product/application development cycles.

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