By SCOTT DEWING
Published: February 2009

REMEMBER WHEN THE INTERNET was referred to as the “information superhighway”? The term became popular in the 1990s, but has been attributed to having been created by Al Gore back in 1978. This, of course, comes as no surprise to us because when it comes to the Internet, the invention of it or otherwise, Gore’s name seems to always pop up like a stubborn weed in the flower bed of history. Al Gore certainly did not invent the Internet much to the chagrin of a reckless media who, leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, insisted on misquoting him and propagating the myth that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the Internet”.

The “information superhighway” is dead and today’s hot new techno-babble buzz phrase is “cloud computing”. The Cloud is all the rage. If you go to a cocktail party in Silicon Valley, you’ll hear the phrase uttered no less than 1,000 times. I don’t know this from personal experience because, being almost 40, I’m way too old for Silicon Valley’s young, high-tech crowd and therefore never receive invitations to these swank cocktail parties. I rely upon text dispatches and Twitter updates from my younger tech industry insiders who report that the coming of The Cloud is “fasho”. (That’s chat-speak for the phrase “for sure” for those of us who are too old to immediately grasp the grammatical butcherings and spelling slaughters of the text generation.)

Like the “information superhighway”, The Cloud is really just a way of describing various functions of the Internet that have been around in one form or another for decades. Like the “information superhighway”, The Cloud exists because just saying “the Internet” isn’t cool enough and, for reasons that scientists and scholars still have not been able to figure out, cannot be grasped and understood by the population at large. Just in case you find yourself at one of those Silicon Valley cocktail soirees, let me lay out for you what “cloud computing” is so that you can wow your crowd. I’ll even throw in some other buzz phrases and assorted acronyms so that you’ll have an entire arsenal at your disposal.

First of all, “cloud” is a metaphor for the nebulous Internet. It’s drawn on white-boards a million times a day all over the world by information technology professionals, geeks and hackers. It’s puffy and usually in the center of the diagram, which details various network connections, devices, etc. For example, you could diagram your own home connection to the Internet by drawing a cloud shape and a house (a square with a triangle on top will do) on a piece of paper or a cocktail napkin if you happen to already be at the party. Now connect the cloud and the house with a line that represents the type of physical connection (modem, cable modem, DSL, etc.) that you have to the Internet. That’s it, you’ve drawn a network diagram. It’s a crude one, but a network diagram nonetheless. Now, if you want to spice it up a bit, you can sketch the computer and modem in there. You can add a router, switch, and/or firewall as well if you have those devices.

Also connected to that cloud that represents the Internet are millions of other networks and computers. For example, you could represent your entire neighborhood as a “node” connecting to the cloud you’ve drawn. Some of the computers connected to the cloud are simple home PCs. (Yes, I include Macs in that term because no matter what those goof-balls in the “Hi, I’m a Mac” / “And I’m a PC” commercials say, they’re both a “personal computer” no matter what operating system they run.) Other computers are high-end servers, such as Web servers, that “serve” content to the PCs that connect to them using applications such as a Web browser.

Other servers don’t just serve up content. They run hosted applications that do all the heavy processing and data lifting then transmit results back to your PC. The acronym for this is SaaS, which stands for “Software as a Service”. (I particularly like “SaaS” because it sounds “sassy”. I predict it would go over quite well at the cocktail party.) I’m using SaaS right now to write this column. It’s called Google Docs. The word processing software is, in part, running on Google’s servers out there in The Cloud. The data I’m creating is stored out in The Cloud too.

PaaS, or Platform as a Service, is somewhat similar to SaaS. With PaaS, software developers develop applications that are stored and run on a vendor’s computing infrastructure. Amazon and Google are central players in this slice of The Cloud. Just as with SaaS, this too is a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony. Microsoft has thus embarked on a “hey, you, get off of my cloud” mission with their “cloud services operating system” codenamed “Azure” due out this year.

Cloud computing is all part of the “Web 2.0” revolution, which, “encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content,” according to Wikipedia, which itself is a good example of Web 2.0 in action. Web 2.0 is another buzz phrase you’ll want in your cocktail party arsenal. But make sure you’re prepared to deal with the even newer “Web 3.0” and the “Semantic Web”, which promises to unify all data with a common “language” and a common understanding of what each piece of data represents. And when that happens, The Cloud will be less of the nebulous cloud that it is today and more of an intelligent cloud rising up to the heavens.

Well, good luck and may The Cloud be with you. Hopefully, I’ll see you at the next cocktail party, but don’t count on it.