Nathan Gregory

Before the Internet;

Before the Cloud;

Even Before ARPANET there was TYMNET

 

     The Cloud! It sounds fluffy and soft. Amorphous, remote, floating above the world. Run it in the Cloud, we say. A modern metaphor, but we once had another name, a more descriptive name for using someone else’s computer.

 

We called it time-sharing.

 

     Today we mix the idea of using someone else’s computer with the concept of a network and call the combination The Cloud, imagining we have invented something new.

 

     But it isn’t so new after all. Beginning in the 1960s, a company created a successful business making remote computer services available inexpensively to anyone via a network built for that purpose. In doing so, they created the first cloud. They called it Tymnet, and the company was Tymshare.

 

NOW AVAILABLE!!