In Wired's April 1994 feature "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II", Andy Hertzfeld commented on Telescript, General Magic's distributed programming language:
The term cloud was used to refer to platforms for distributed computing as early as 1993, when Apple spin-off General Magic and AT&T used it in describing their (paired) Telescript and PersonaLink technologies. With this simplification, the implication is that the specifics of how the endpoints of a network are connected are not relevant to understanding the diagram. The word cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet and a standardized cloud-like shape was used to denote a network on telephony schematics. The cloud symbol was used to represent networks of computing equipment in the original ARPANET by as early as 1977, and the CSNET by 1981 -both predecessors to the Internet itself.
References to the phrase "cloud computing" appeared as early as 1996, with the first known mention in a Compaq internal document. ( January 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. This section may be confusing or unclear to readers. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and that it enables IT teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand, providing the burst computing capability: high computing power at certain periods of peak demand. 5.5 Serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)Īdvocates of public and hybrid clouds note that cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs.5.4 Mobile "backend" as a service (MBaaS).