[ih] Better-than-Best Effort

[Jack Haverty]

Actually, I think of "The Cloud" as TimeSharing 2.0.

When I look at the last 60 years or so of history with an economics 
lens, there's a sort of cyclic pattern.

Computers in the 60s were very expensive and users were charged for use 
by the number of CPU seconds their programs used.  To keep those 
expensive computers busy, they were fed a continuous stream of jobs on 
punch cards, day and night.   You submitted your "job" and often got the 
results the next day.   People could wait, computers could not.   Their 
time was too valuable.

People could interact directly with computers, but that would mean that 
the expensive computer would be idle while waiting for the user to 
digest what it had just done and tell it what to do next.   So 
TimeSharing evolved as a useful technique to keep that expensive 
computer busy while allowing users to get their results faster, 
especially for very simple (to the CPU) tasks.

TimeSharing was popular for quite a while, but eventually users got 
frustrated by the experience of relying on "The Comp Center" to keep the 
machine running, and the tendency for those managers to put more and 
more users on a machine until it no longer felt like a User had a whole 
computer to work with.

But the Economics had changed.  Computers had gotten much much less 
expensive, so much so that it became economically feasible to purchase 
your own computer, and not worry about keeping it busy every minute of 
every day.  Plus you controlled that computer, rather than some 
bureaucracy inside the glassed-off computer installation.   Power was in 
the Users' hands.  Workstations and departmental minicomputers arrived.  
As costs dropped even further, Personal Computers became the norm.

As LANs and PCs became dominant in offices and such commercial 
environments, the now-less-expensive "big computers" became servers, 
interacting with all those PCs in computer-to-computer communications, 
rather than the computer-to-terminal norm of TimeSharing.

With costs still dropping rapidly, and silo-ization of "networking" 
creating an unwieldy mix of incompatible networking technologies even 
inside a single organization, corporate managers noticed that the 
expensive part of IT had become the labor involved in keeping all that 
stuff running, updated to fix critical vulnerabilities, and continuously 
upgraded as software vendors dictated and Users demanded.   TCP/IP was a 
universal replacement for that hodgepodge, and Industry "embraced the 
Internet".   All of the other networking schemes withered away.

With costs of computing, and of communications, still dropping fast, the 
labor to operate an organization's "IT Department" became the dominant 
cost.   Especially in smaller organizations, it was difficult to have 
the right personnel skills around to handle problems and needs that 
arose.   A specialist in some aspect of technology might be needed 
urgently, but keeping such a person on the payroll would be an 
unnecessary expense when that particular problem or need had been addressed.

Cloud computing provided a solution.   By concentrating the technology 
all in one place, somewhere "out in the cloud", the expensive resources, 
whether computers or people, could be kept busy.   Cloud computing might 
be viewed as TimeSharing of not only computers and storage, but also of 
people.   TimeSharing 2.0 is here.  But instead of Users themselves 
interacting with a Computer in the Cloud, a User's personal computing 
device is interacting on that Users' behalf with often many Computers in 
several Clouds.

Of course, similar changes have been happening, and continue to happen, 
in the costs of communications.  Back in the late 60s, when TimeSharing 
was emerging, computers were still expensive and there was a desire to 
share such expensive resources to keep them busy. Computers were 
connected to Users by use of Terminals, sending and receiving characters.

At the time, communications was expensive.   Leased lines could be 
bought, but not economically justified unless they were kept busy. 
Dial-up access was available, also expensive and priced by distance 
involved, and, just like in the case of the big expensive computers, 
dial-up lines were "wasted" while the User was thinking about what to do 
next.

IIRC, a major motivation for Packet Switching was to address that 
economic problem, by allowing multiple Users to share communications 
circuits.   The circuits could be kept busy, and a mix of leased and 
dial-up circuits could be used to achieve the lowest-cost means to 
interconnect those Users and Computers.

I recall many visits to ARPA on Wilson Blvd in Arlington, VA. There were 
terminals all over the building, pretty much all connected through the 
ARPANET to a PDP-10 3000 miles away at USC in Marine Del Rey, CA.  The 
technology of Packet Switching made it possible to keep a PDP-10 busy 
servicing all those Users and minimize the costs of everything, 
including those expensive communications circuits.  This was circa 
1980.   Users could efficiently share expensive communications, and 
expensive and distant computers -- although I always thought ARPA's 
choice to use a computer 3000 miles away was probably more to 
demonstrate the viability of the ARPANET than because it was cheaper 
than using a computer somewhere near DC.

Since 1980, costs of everything have continued to drop.  But of course, 
Users' expectations have also continued to rise.  In the 1980s, the only 
economic way to move things like video files was shipping magtapes on an 
airplane.   Streaming such material wasn't even a dream.

The economics now are also different, and it would seem that eventually 
the economic motivation for techniques such as Packet Switching might 
have disappeared.  In addition, the limitations of such technology are 
becoming more evident, and some silo-ization of specific solutions has 
been happening.   Bob Purvy's and Louis Mamakos' descriptions strike me 
as two examples of innovators tackling a specific problem with a point 
solution that mitigates that problem for a specific User community (aka 
their customers).

There's a lot more to the story of course, as other changes and 
innovations occurred.  E.g., we no longer interact much directly with 
remote computers, but rather with the one on our desks or in our hands.  
Latency is possibly more important now than bandwidth, since while fiber 
can provide lots of bandwidth but no one has yet figured out how to move 
data faster than the speed of light.

So, that's a hopefully not too long explanation of why I mused that 
perhaps Packet Switching is no longer the best solution, at least when 
viewed through my economic lens.   The need to share expensive 
communications lines has apparently almost disappeared, and latency is a 
new hurdle.    If someone ever figures out how to make software that 
"just works" and doesn't need lots of care, perhaps "The Cloud" will 
wither away as well.  Maybe some AI like we see in the SciFi world.  
Hopefully benevolent.....

Just my perspective - YMMV,
/Jack Haverty







On 8/27/21 5:24 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 8/27/2021 4:10 PM, Vint Cerf via Internet-history wrote:
>> time-sharing is alive and well - spelled CLOUD
>
> As PCs started to emerge Postel commented that that would eliminate 
> the need for time-sharing.  I suggested that even for one person, it 
> would be good for their computer to be running multiple, simultaneous 
> activities.
>
> So, nevermind the cloud.  Look at your phone.
>
> d/
>