Fathers of Clouds – A Tribute

Strategies And Technologies for Cloud Computing Interoperability (SATCCI)

By G C Network | March 4, 2009

As I alluded to in an earlier post, a major cloud computing interoperability event will be held in conjunction with the Object Management Group (OMG) March Technical Meeting on March…

Government Cloud Computing E-zine Launched

By G C Network | March 3, 2009

Today marks the launch of a new electronic magazine dedicated to addressing cloud computing within the government space. Over the last year during my personal exploration of this marketspace, I’ve…

NCOIC Plenary: Cloud Computing Working Group

By G C Network | March 2, 2009

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group. Led by Cisco Systems Distinguished Engineer, Mr. Krishna Sankar of Cisco Systems, the meeting purpose…

2nd Government Cloud Computing Survey – A Sneak Peek

By G C Network | February 25, 2009

This month, we’re in the middle of collecting data for our 2nd Government Cloud Computing Survey. to peek your curiosity (an to entice your participation) here is a sneak peek…

Government could save billions with cloud computing

By G C Network | February 23, 2009

In a recent study, published by MeriTalk, Red Hat and DLT Solutions, the Federal government could save $6.6 billion by using cloud computing or software-as-a-service. “Looking at 30 federal agencies,…

Cloud Games at FOSE 2009

By G C Network | February 19, 2009

ONLINE REGISTRATION NOW AVAILABLE Booz Allen Hamilton is launching its Cloud Computing Wargame (CCW)T at FOSE March 10-12, 2009 in Washington, DC. The CCW is designed to simulate the major…

IBM and Amazon

By G C Network | February 16, 2009

According to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) site, you can now use DB2, Informix, WebSphere sMash, WebSphere Portal Server or Lotus Web Content Management on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. “This relationship…

A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | February 13, 2009

Yesterday, Berkeley released their View of Cloud Computing with a view that cloud computing provides an elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, that is unprecedented in…

Cloud Economic Models

By G C Network | February 11, 2009

One of the most important drivers of cloud computing in the Federal space is its perceived “compelling” economic value. Some initial insight on the economic argument is now available on…

Cloud Computing In Government: From Google Apps To Nuclear Warfare

By G C Network | February 10, 2009

Today, I want to thank John Foley of InformationWeek for an enjoyable interview and his excellent post, Cloud Computing In Government: From Google Apps To Nuclear Warfare. Our discussion covered…


(A guest post from Mr. Ray Holloman, NJVC Digital Communications Manager )

For more than half a century, cloud computing has changed names more often than a Hollywood starlet.
Utility computing. Time share. Thin client. SaaS. PaaS. IaaS. While concepts have been added and capabilities grown, cloud computing was no more invented by Amazon or other modern vendors in the last seven years reality invented by reality shows. It’s simply been advance, repackaged and repurposed for as long as computer connectivity has existed.
In honor of Father’s Day, NJVC looks up the family tree of cloud computing to say thank you to six of the fathers of cloud computing.  (And if you’re wondering about a gift, a single tie will suffice. Certainly, these guys understand how to share.)

Dr. John McCarthy—In the manner that genius tends to be promiscuous in emerging fields, McCarthy is often given credit as the father or influencer of many things, including Artificial Intelligence, e-commerce and time-share computing—what may be considered the earliest implementation of cloud computing. In 1961, McCarthy famously described the future of networked computing as a utility. “Computing may someday be organized as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system. … Certain subscribers might offer service to other subscribers. … The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.” McCarthy’s vision of the computing network to come was mainframe—based in a way that somewhat missed the bull’s eye, but hit the right target, regardless of the technology’s name. “We keep inventing new names for timesharing,” McCarthy’s Stanford colleague Les Earnest told the Los Angeles Times when McCarthy died in 2011. (https://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/). “It came to be called servers. … Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it.” For those born in the Internet era, McCarthy’s familiar wobbly bonnet of gray hear and thick, black horn-rimmed glasses marked him as someone of another time, and he was—though he may have been a man of the future rather than the past. McCarthy’s concept of the rise of cloud computing wasn’t perfect—he shortchanged the value of the personal computer—but his implementation of timesharing set a course for cloud computing, which is only just being realized. 
J. C. R. Licklider.jpgJ.C.R. Licklider—In the late 1950s and early 1960s, even technical lexicon came adorned with the influence of Buck Rogers and the space race. Thus Licklider’s 1962 declaration of a vision that would become the Internet bore the unmistakably audacious and space age sobriquet “Intergalactic Computer Network.” If Licklider spoke on a vast scale, he thought on even broader one, constrained by the bandwidth of the times, not the bandwidth of mind. His Intergalactic Computer Network concept spurred the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, a direct ancestor of the modern Internet and the globally connected world. But “Lick,” as he was commonly known, understood the possibilities of cloud computing in a manner more liberating than more utilitarian vision of McCarthy’s early predictions. Licklider saw the possibility of global computing as an element of the human lifescape—a tool of personal connectivity, not merely an agent of business.
Kemeny John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz—In pseudo code the duo who created BASIC might appreciate,
 “10: IF {Cloud Pioneer} Then GOTO 20
   20: PRINT “THANK YOU.”
Kurtz2Dartmouth Professors Kemeny and Kurtz designed the BASIC programming language to allow students to write programs on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), the first successful, large-scale implementation of time-sharing, in 1964. While the technology was then still called timesharing, the underlying concepts, remote access and shared resources, have the same genetic markers of what is now cloud computing. Kemeny and Kurtz’s introduction of BASIC also underscored another key concept of modern cloud computing—ease of use. By the 1970s, the DTSS supported more than 300 users—and 300 pairs of bellbottoms—simultaneously. The system lasted 35 years, before being deprecated in 1999, and proved the feasibility of the earliest cloud.
Marc Benioff—If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the familiar image of Benioff seated beneath a poster of the word software crossed out, must somehow be a collage. In it is an entire biography of how Benioff pioneered software as a service (SaaS) and then wrote the book on modern cloud computing (Literally. You can buy it here https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Cloud-Salesforce-com-Billion-Dollar-Company-/dp/0470521163/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371217561&sr=1-1.).  Benioff, a vice president at Oracle by the boyish age of 26, founded Salesforce.com in 1999, delivering customer relationship management software over the Internet in a time when the screeching of dialup modems still sound tracked most Web usage. Benioff’s mission, “The End of Software,” is as brash as it has been predictive in an era that has seen the rise of Google Apps, Amazon Web Services and an entire SaaS industry. Salesforce.com remains the single most popular CRM tool; Benioff the single-most visible face of SaaS.
Vivek-kundra-2.jpgVivek Kundra—In the process-driven bureaucracy of federal IT, implementing organizational change can be a little like steering a battleship with a pair of wooden oars. But Kundra, the nation’s first federal CIO, managed to leave an enterprise-level legacy during his two-and-a-half-year tenure, highlighted most pointedly by the acceptance of cloud in the federal IT vocabulary. Kundra’s “25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT,” remains a core vision statement in federal IT; his cloud-first mandate one of era-markers in government infrastructure. Perhaps his greatest contribution, though, was simply consensus building, gaining acceptance for cloud computing among federal leadership through something of a charisma crusade. “The force of his personality [led] to the rapid adoption of cloud computing as a major driver of reform,” NJVC Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, Kevin L. Jackson wrote in 2011. While the returns on Kundra’s initiatives remain uncertain, the first chapter of the book of federal cloud will be littered with references to his work.  
Reuven CohenReuven Cohen—Middle ground seems to be a blank spot on the map of Reuven Cohen when it comes to the importance of cloud to IT. “You must adapt or die,” the self-titled “digital provocateur” (Read his Forbes blog of the same name here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/”) declared bluntly in a 2012 blog post, regarding the current cloud transformation in IT and willingness of IT to adapt in general. But Cohen, cloud’s aggressively articulate hype man  and one-man-IT/PR firm, is a doer, not just an advocate. In 2004, Cohen founded Enomaly, an early infrastructure-as-a-service offering, later purchased by Virtustream in 2012, where Cohen currently serves as an executive vice president. Perhaps most importantly, Cohen’s techno-proselytizing, has helped cloud gain acceptance in and out of the IT community.


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