Cloud computing is not new

In a previous life I was the principal of a school outside of Katherine which implemented what is now known as cloud computing. This was in 1996!!!.

In those days it was called Terminal Services which was an add-on to Server NT. Terminal Services was developed by Citrix and Windows NT had a poorer version of it. It was based upon the mainframe ideas of the 1950s. Basically each desktop had a small client application (called a thin client) which simply ran a screen display of a service running on a server.

All the programs ran on the server and all the data manipulation was done on the server with the traffic over the network simply updating the screen display on the client and sending back commands to the server.

This worked very well with a room full of computers able to run Photoshop via Terminal Services, through a radio network in1996!! Some people will still tell you today that it can't be done.

I remember talking to the techs at CSG about this in late 1990. They saw great potential in the use of Terminal Services over the internet, not just over closed networks. The only issue then was the speed of the Internet.

Neil Williams