The origin of the Cloud

As we all are talking about Cloud in our various conversations hence it's extremely important to know the origin of the cloud. I had gone through on various sites to extract this information and here is the inference:

The first commercial computer, UNIVAC, hit the market in 1951 in the United States government and large corporations, its first customers, were eager to get their hands on this state-of-the-art technology. They were not only expensive to purchase, but they were expensive to operate too.

The first computers were shared by many people, which required the user to travel to the computer's location to use it. By the early 1960s, a solution was developed called remote job entry (RJE). This meant that a computer user could send data requests to a computer from a remote location, making it the first time a person did not have to be in the presence of the computer to operate the machine. It also meant that multiple users could have access to the computer from different locations at the same time.

This was an incredibly important development in computer technology, providing multiple users access to an expensive piece of equipment.

While the term "cloud computing" wasn’t in use at the time, its concepts were already in play. Technological developments in the 1970s and 1980s saw the use of the cloud in different forms. By the early 1990s, the internet was depicted as a cloud in patent diagrams. It wasn’t until 1996, when Compaq Computer Corporation used the term in a business plan, that the phrase was coined. This revolutionary new software was accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Unlike traditional CRM software, this new cloud-based software did not have to be installed on every computer in a company’s inventory. It was also a much cheaper alternative.

This groundbreaking new approach set the stage for cloud computing as we know it today. Salesforce set the example for other popular cloud-based software like Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox. In the mid-2000s, Amazon developed a cloud-based application to manage its own internal operations. After building an infrastructure of web services for its own use, Amazon moved to offer this cloud-based system as a commercial service in 2006 with the launch of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This system gave users access to computers for the purpose of running their own applications from the cloud.

By the late 2000s, Google had released Google Docs, a cloud-based word processing software, as a free service. Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Forms soon followed.

The cloud continues to evolve...