The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 6

even most casual histories of cloud computing describe, debates over the
need for a “computer utility” anticipated today's debates about the cloud.
At that time, people who were familiar with utilities that provided roads,
water, and electricity wondered whether there was need for a public or
regulated utility for computer communication. Was not information as
essential a resource as roads, water, and power? With widespread agreement
that it was both a resource and essential, some concluded that a handful
of centralized computer facilities strategically located around the world
and connected by telecommunications networks to keyboards and screens
would satisfy the world's need for information. Today, there are far more
than a handful of large data centers worldwide, but the principle of the
utility is inscribed in cloud computing systems to the point that interest
is returning to this venerable idea. Questions are also emerging about
whether computer utilities should be government enterprises, or at least
publicly regulated even if they remain commercial enterprises.
Chapter 2 examines a variety of the cloud's predecessors from when
the computer utility was young. The Soviet Union staked much of its
economic strategy in the 1950s on the ability to build large-scale “cyber-
netic” systems to carry out the work of a planned economy. In the 1970s
the Chilean government experimented on a democratic version of such
a strategy, with workers on the ground contributing to the economic-
planning process through computer systems. The 1980s saw the develop-
ment of government and commercial systems for providing information
on demand through what were called teletext and videotex systems. Their
full potential was not realized until the Internet appeared on desktop
computers and in New Yorker cartoons in the 1990s.
Chapter 2 proceeds to deine cloud computing and take up its diverse
forms and characteristics. Cloud computing has been deined in many
ways, but most would agree that it is a powerful system for producing,
storing, analyzing, and distributing data, information, applications, and
services to organizations and individuals. If you communicate with Gmail,
download music from iCloud, buy Kindle topics from Amazon, or if your
company uses Salesforce to manage its customer database, then you know
about and use the cloud. Among its major characteristics, cloud computing
enables on-demand self-service access to information and services delivered
over global networks—including, but not limited to, the public networks
of the Internet. Information and applications can be pooled to meet user