Sounds like something right out of Star Wars, doesn’t it? Actually the concept of an “intergalactic computer network” was introduced in the early 1960’s by J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider, considered one of the most influential figures in general computing history. His vision was for everyone on the globe to be interconnected and accessing programs and data at any site from anywhere – a vision that sounds a lot like what we are calling “Cloud Computing.”

So, instead of writing yet another blog that attempts to define Cloud Computing, I want to take you on a tour of the history of the Internet and the technology innovations that have brought us to this point in time. This historical backdrop is good preparation for the panel I am hosting at the IDC Cloud Computing Forum in San Francisco, on “Building the Business Case for Cloud Computing: Understanding the Opportunities and Benefits” featuring presentations from Accenture, Amazon, Red Hat, The Shumacher Group, and IDC analyst Frank Gens.

So, it’s back to the 1960’s and the era where mainframe users time-share a centralized computing resource and “cloud” is a telecommunications term for part of the network between two end points. In 1962 our intergalactic network visionary, Lick, was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During his term, Lick provided funding to projects that developed the ARPANET – the forerunner to today’s global Internet. ARPANET was officially born in 1969, interconnecting research groups at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

The first 10 years of ARPANET were dominated by mainframe computers. It saw the development of TPC/IP, the basic communication language of the Internet, and the first “killer” Internet application, email. By 1980 over 218 host sites were on-line. The next 10 years continued the maturation process with RISC-based computers running UNIX becoming the Internet computing platform. FTP, the protocol for exchanging files over the Internet, was developed along with dial-up access and more Internet-based applications like newsgroups and search. By 1990 there were about 300,000 host sites on-line. Not too bad a ramp for a research network that was used mainly by government and academia. But, not exactly what Lick would call intergalactic.

However, between 1990 and 2000 there were cosmic changes in cyberspace that propelled us toward Cloud Computing. Commercial restrictions were lifted from the Internet in 1991 along with the introduction of the World Wide Web. The release in 1993 of Mosaic, the first Graphical Browser, opened Internet to people who were not geeks by nature and “Surfing the Internet,” a term coined by Jean Armour Polly became the rage. Computers with x86 processors running the Linux operating system became viable alternatives to the RISC/UNIX systems for Internet infrastructure. By Dec 2002, Netcraft was reporting 35,543,105 sites on the Internet and concepts like “Grid Computing,” Utility Computing and “Software as a Service” were evolving.

Over the last six years processor innovations have directly contributed in the evolution toward Cloud Computing. The AMD Opteron™ processor, first introduced in April 2003, brought 64-bit capabilities and Direct Connect Architecture to the world’s largest computing community, necessary technologies for handling growing numbers of web transactions and on-line data. AMD is now shipping Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with the industry leading virtualization and energy efficiency technologies required by large web/cloud compute clusters.

So – where are we now? The term “Web 2.0” is used to describe the era of the Internet, marked by user-generated content and online social media, after the Dot Bomb. Social networks are the new rage, allowing a person to create and publish data to the Web that is accessible by anyone in the world 24×7. And “Cloud Computing” is the buzz word of the moment for both commercial and consumer computing.

The 1968 a paper written by J.C.R . Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, The Computer as a Communication Device, lays out the vision for the era we are entering today “a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information.” Move over, Luke Skywalker, Lick had the real intergalactic vision – and we call it Cloud Computing.

Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.