I got my start with computer networking way back in the mid-nineties, about a year or two before the world wide web defined the "internet." My interest was in the Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) of the time in my never-ending quests for, well, quests.
The MUD I found back then, which is astonishingly still going 30+ years later, got me curious about how machines linked up to each other. When I discovered that my beloved game was just running on some dude's extra PC in his basement, it was eye-opening. Is that all it took?
Years later when I got back to college, I took a networking topics course, and read about the development of the Domain Name System (DNS), which is what maps the words you type in your url bar to the locations of machines that serve the content we call the internet. When I learned that the whole house of cards was just some big text file stored on a handful of computers around the world, that did a lot to demystify the tubes.
It was around this time that "The Cloud" started becoming a thing. Like most friendly-sounding tech terms, The Cloud is more marketing than anything else. The general idea of it is that instead of owning a PC and running it in your basement, you can rent PCs from "professionals" who'll run them for you. Like much about computers, The Cloud was a solution to a problem _necessitated by the computing power of the time_. This warrants the question:
I got my start with computer networking way back in the mid-nineties, about a year or two before the world wide web defined the "internet." My interest was in the Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) of the time in my never-ending quests for, well, quests.
The MUD I found back then, which is astonishingly still going 30+ years later, got me curious about how machines linked up to each other. When I discovered that my beloved game was just running on some dude's extra PC in his basement, it was eye-opening. Is that all it took?
Years later when I got back to college, I took a networking topics course, and read about the development of the Domain Name System (DNS), which is what maps the words you type in your url bar to the locations of machines that serve the content we call the internet. When I learned that the whole house of cards was just some big text file stored on a handful of computers around the world, that did a lot to demystify the tubes.
It was around this time that "The Cloud" started becoming a thing. Like most friendly-sounding tech terms, The Cloud is more marketing than anything else. The general idea of it is that instead of owning a PC and running it in your basement, you can rent PCs from "professionals" who'll run them for you. Like much about computers, The Cloud was a solution to a problem _necessitated by the computing power of the time_. This warrants the question:
Do We Still Need The Cloud?