A recent article in Business Week details how a lofty new strategy plans to place incredible computing power in the hands of many. Google, by far the leader in the Cloud Vision of linking the most massive data banks together, is joining King of Computing, IBM, to link many large computer systems. So, again we all will likely benefit by this further advance: whether industry, universities, hospitals, public and private powerful computer systems. We all should soon begin to benefit by quicker reaction time to cross work zones that now has many bottlenecks. We should have our heads in the Clouds, but in the right way. Not like that last time.
That last time? Yes, it was late summer 1969. In response to US Military threats to withhold research funds until they pooled their data, Stanford and four other universities began to create a new electronic entity, hidden main server and a telephone line connection of all known information. In event of a Russian nuclear attack, America could rebuild and civilization not be lost into a post Atomic Dark age. This was military funding and ideology at it’s finest. The Arpanet soon had all universities and research funded agencies, then finally the rest of us. And now we couldn’t live without our emails, which has been a boon to all: talk to sick grandma across the country, send her today’s photos of the kids at the zoo.
Yet while Arpanet was being built, grumpily, begrudgingly; the rest of us were all out in our yards, back and forth to our TV’s, our heads in the clouds,watching this huge, historic event, the Moon Landing. Such joy and exultation. And it went on for several years, while quietly lads named Jobs and Gates were tinkering with computers. And now a lad their son’s age at Google is our Cloud Man. Business Week’s recently featured story on Google and their coming cloud wisdom says that young Mr. Christophe Bisciglia keeps challenging brilliant students in his university sponsored course with questions such as “What would you do with one thousand times more computing power”?
And as a favorite of the CEO Eric E. Schmidt, who nattily dressed like a banker, BW says makes an inspired brain storming team with the long haired, fast talking, quick thinking 27 year old Mr. Bisciglia, who was not born when we looked at the wrong clouds. BW says Google has been best managed and is by far the strongest in this competition for the most powerful cloud networks. Teaming with IBM in which all possible computing systems are available as backup, which will streamline many varying systems between industry, government, hospitals, police, fire, all emergency, and with plenty room for the rest of us with all these bandwidths streamlining together.
This is perhaps one of the finest examples of how greater civilian benefits can come out of a necessary military response appropriate to the time. That initial download of data, now transformed to linking all the mainframes so all are humming busily, even as switching stations for billions of other data bytes, while they work on their own programs.This can only help make our cloud vision quicker, brighter, more user friendly, and looking at the right clouds. More on this next.
Derek Dashwood
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