2026 Cloud Field Day 25 - The Rise and Fall of Cloud Computing - Again!

History of several boom and bust cycles in "cloud" computing - and a warning that the next bust will be soon.

1. The Rise and Fall of Cloud Computing - Again! Cloud Field Day 25 Tom Lyon @aka_pugs@mastodon.social
2. 1930s - Data/Compute Service Bureaus 1929: Columbia University Statistical Bureau HPC for Astronomy! 1931: IBM 601 Multiplying Punch 1932: IBM Service Bureau Division Occasional use punched card equipment 1938: WPA Mathematical Tables Project Enabling standard: punched cards Economics: Great Depression, Hitler, War Cloud? No, just skyscrapers.
3. World War II
4. Post War - Still Punched Cards
5. 1950s - Giant Brains! (but mostly punched cards) 1951 - UNIVAC delivered to Census Bureau 1954/5 - IBM 650, IBM 704 1956 - UNIVAC Scientific (1103A) 1956 - Dartmouth A.I. workshop 1956 - IBM consent decree - Service Bureau Corp. 1957: Perceptron neural net 1959: 1st SAGE site Enabling standards: transistor, magnetic tape, core memory Economy: Baby boom, cold war, Korean war
6. Early 60s - Services Galore Hardware companies all had service bureaus Independent processing services, e.g., ADP Facilities services - EDS - 1962 Roots of time-sharing: MIT, Dartmouth Software becomes a business - SDC, ADR
7. Late 60s - The Go-Go Years Massive hype, hundreds of companies pursuing remote, time-shared “utility computing” G.E., Tymshare, National CSS, UCC, … 1968 - 1st software IPO - Computer Sciences Corp. 1970 - H. Ross Perot - first computing billionaire - “irrational exuberance” Enabling standards: Teletypes, modems, ASCII, FORTRAN, Basic, hard drives Economy: Vietnam war
8. Early 70s - Gone, Gone Recession of 1970, 1971 RCA and G.E. leave computer business Shift from services to software (fewer people, less capital) Rise of the minicomputer - DEC, DG Word processors and calculators - Wang, Datapoint, HP Enabling standards: semiconductor memory - Intel
9. Late 70s - Moore’s Law kicks in Microprocessors Personal Computers, Homebrew, Apple UNIX Xerox Alto/Ethernet 32 bit minis; mainframe clones ARPAnet, TYMnet, Telenet, Compuserve
10. Early 80s - the Desktop Era begins IBM PC, Microsoft, Compaq, Intel Apollo, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics
11. 1984 - The Network is the Computer The cloud is the network? (NFS architecture diagram)
12. Late 80s, Early 90s - the Networking Era Cisco, 3Com, … Novell Arpanet, Usenet, CSnet, NSFnet -> Internet
13. Late 90s - The Web / Dot Com Boom 1994: Netscape 1995: Windows 95 includes TCP/IP ISPs, ASPs Beginnings of SaaS, IaaS 1999: Loudcloud, Terraspring (no x86 VM) “Irrational Exuberance”
14. 2000-2002 - The Dot Com Bust Shift from Services to Software Loudcloud -> Opsware -> HP Terraspring -> Sun “N1” “Creative Accounting” Worldcom Enron
15. 2000s 2002: Low Point of S&P 500 2002: A.I. = American Idol 2006: AWS launches 2009: ImageNet database 2008/9: Real Estate Recession Irrational exuberance, creative accounting, Bernie Madoff
16. 2010s - A.I. gets real 2011 - IBM Watson wins on Jeopardy 2012: AlexNet proves “unreasonable effectiveness” of neural nets (Nvidia up 600x since then) 2014: Google acquires Deepmind 2015: OpenAI founded as not-for-profit Enabling tech: GPGPUs, big data
17. 2020s - A.I. gets unreal Insane data-center buildout; nuclear energy revived Nvidia! Irrational Exuberance Creative Accounting Circular Investments & Revenue Great environment for massive fraud (led by Trump administration) Huge data sovereignty & copyright issues
18. The future? Ugly Clouds ahead! There has to be an A.I. recession - but how soon? Made much worse by fraud & government idiocy Slow climb back to A.I. “normalcy” - whatever that is
19. The future? Ugly Clouds ahead! There has to be an A.I. recession - but how soon? Made much worse by fraud & government idiocy Slow climb back to A.I. “normalcy” - whatever that is