The Advent of the Cloud
With Cloud computing being ‘all the rage’, I can’t help but equate the evolution of the IT sector with the demographic that tends to follow suite. Does anyone really remember “Time Sharing”? One job in…one job out.
If you’re under 45 years old, probably not.
Dumb terminals, probably IBM green screens, hard wired into monolithic mainframes; could be IBM’s, NCR’s, Burroughs, Digital Equipment Corp’s (DEC’s), Wang, Sperry Rand, Control Data (my former employer), Honeywell and yes………even General Electric.
This was the era of the baby boomer. Typically folks born between 1946 and 1964. Green stamps, posty notes, wide ties, milkmen, xx cents for a gallon of gas, hula hoops and Frisbees, drive-ins, silly putty, mood rings, lava lamps, 8 track players and pet rocks all come to mind.
Then Nerds starting showing up……..and creating companies that would forever change the way we live.
PC’s, Client Server, then Enterprise and Internet computing came into vogue and as a result time, sharing and ‘batch processing’ went through any number of transformations.
Application Service Provider (ASP) comes to mind where a vendor might house any number of ‘instances’ of an app and effectively ‘rent’ it to a customer. This is about the time the Gen X crowd (born early 60’s to late 70’s) would have hit the employment market.
Then SaaS (software-as-a-service), PaaS, and IaaS, started showing up. And low and behold……here comes Gen Y (born from the 70’s to 2000) to bring it to the marketplace.
And now “the cloud”…………..
Just wondering what they’ll call that generation. Gen Z?
Matt Teahan, PEI
