[ih] Geek Terminology (was Re: Resource sharing)

[John Day]

The use of the "cloud" terminology has been interesting and amusing. 
It really shows how much more adept the marketers have become at 
deceiving even the technically knowledgeable.

A few years ago, I remember reading an interview with Schmidt at 
Google in the NY Times by Steve Zohr about the next big thing being 
the cloud.  You could almost see Zohr hanging on every word (fawning 
would not have been too strong a description of the interview) as he 
asks Schmidt how much goes in the cloud vs how much stays on the PC. 
Schmidt draws a box on a whiteboard and puts a line thru it at one 
end, saying 90% in the cloud and 10% on the PC, just the user 
interface.  Zohr ate it up.  Meanwhile I was rolling on the floor 
with laughter:  It was back to SNA.  The PC as 3270 talking to the 
mainframe.

In the 1970s and 80s, the phone companies liked to talk about 
offering services "in the network."  With phone companies in most of 
the world being monopolies, this was considered abhorrent, an attempt 
at big brother, etc. etc. There was much railing against it. A 
violation of the vaunted end-to-end principle.  There must be a dumb 
network, etc. But here is precisely the same thing.  Notice how much 
more acceptable "in the cloud" is, even used with a tone of wonder, 
and in place of the phone company, we have Google and Amazon and 
Facebook.  It is the same idea, just dressed up better.  Actually it 
is a bigger threat to us this time that the previous incarnations, 
but we seem far less concerned and much more trusting of it.

This has lead me to describe the timeline as:  mainframes for the 
70s, client/server for the 80s, network computer for the 90s, and the 
cloud for the 00s.  (pun intended).  ;-)

No the cloud is just a more successful marketing term for the same 
model with updated hardware.

The whole thing has gotten a whole lot more sophisticated and even 
the engineers are duped.  Do you really think that Instagram didn't 
expect that reaction to the change?  Given what has happened before 
how could they not?  (A real case of incompetence or intent, no other 
choice).  Now watch, having pushed their customers, they will back 
off, then slowly but surely they will make small changes that will 
largely go unnoticed, or viewed as "they learned their lesson they 
are only doing small things" until they are back to what they 
announced last week.  Comments from the head of Instagram I have seen 
as much as say that.


At 16:17 -0600 23/12/12, Larry Sheldon wrote:
>On 12/23/2012 3:48 PM, John Day wrote:
>
>>Even the nebulous use of "cloud" rather than what it is a "data
>>center."  It sounds so much more reassuring that my stuff is just out
>>there in the cloud, rather stored with someone else in their data
>>center.  (Even that is a euphemism).
>
>Of late I have been wondering:  Has that term's definition morphed 
>without me noticing, or did I use it incorrectly back in the day?
>
>When I was active in networkish stuff in the late 20th century I 
>"cloud" was a device (, metaphorical) for talking about entities 
>that could communicate without much caring how the details in the 
>cloud were arranged.
>
>[My computer, my building, my campus, my company] was network 
>connected to the cloud so it could communicate with other connected 
>entities that also speak {IP, IPX, AppleTalk].
>
>The notion of "data center" never occurred to me.
>
>That term by the way is an example of the vocabulary limitation.  A 
>long time ago in my environment, a "computer center" was a building 
>that housed a few computers--typically between one and three 7074s 
>and 3 or 4 times as many 1401s and 360/30s.
>
>Then, when the technology improved and there was only one or two 
>computer (an 1110 and a 360/30 to support it) they became "data 
>centers).
>
>--
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