From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 30

cutting edge of science and technology. While these typically dealt
with national security-related matters, the agency never felt bound by
military projects alone. One outcome of this view was signiicant work
on general information technology and computer systems, starting with
pioneering research on what was called time-sharing. The irst comput-
ers worked on a one user-one system principle, but because individuals
use computers intermittently, this wasted resources. Research on batch
processing helped to make computers more eficient because it permit-
ted jobs to queue up over time and thereby shrunk nonusage time.
Time-sharing expanded this by enabling multiple users to work on
the same system at the same time. DARPA kick-started time-sharing
with a grant to fund an MIT-based project that, under the leadership
of J. C. R. Licklider, brought together people from Bell Labs, General
Electric, and MIT (Waldrop 2002). With time-sharing was born the
principle of one system serving multiple users, one of the foundations
of cloud computing. The thirty or so companies that sold access to
time-sharing computers, including such big names as IBM and General
Electric, thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. The primary operating system
for time-sharing was Multics (for Multiplexed Information and Com-
puting Service), which was designed to operate as a computer utility
modeled after telephone and electrical utilities. Speciically, hardware
and software were organized in modules so that the system could grow
by adding more of each required resource, such as core memory and
disk storage. This model for what we now call scalability would return
in a far more sophisticated form with the birth of the cloud-computing
concept in the 1990s, and then with the arrival of cloud systems in
the next decade. One of the key similarities, albeit at a more primitive
level, between time-sharing systems and cloud computing is that they
both offer complete operating environments to users. Time-sharing
systems typically included several programming-language processors,
software packages, bulk printing, and storage for iles on- and ofline.
Users typically rented terminals and paid fees for connect time, for
CPU (central processing unit) time, and for disk storage. The growth
of the microprocessor and then the personal computer led to the end
of time-sharing as a proitable business because these devices increas-
ingly substituted, far more conveniently, for the work performed by
companies that sold access to mainframe computers.