New Drivers Revive Old Ideas in New Ways

Veterans in information technology have a sense of déjà vu relating to virtualization and cloud computing. Yes, they are new, but they are also reminiscent of old. IBM VM (Virtual Machine), a forerunner to today’s virtualization, was introduced in 1972. RSTS (Resource Sharing / Time Sharing) is a precursor to cloud computing that was introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

In those earlier days, managing relatively scarce and expensive computing resources was the challenge. Sharing the cost of the computing resources made computing affordable. As a result of Moore’s law and huge advances in data networks, the cost of computing and information resources is no longer an issue. Information processing is available in the post-industrial world to [almost] anyone [almost] anywhere.

The old ideas may have come back, but they are coming back for a different reason. The driver today is keeping up with change. For competitive, risk, legal, and compliance reasons, companies need to stay up-to-date with technology. Even companies with great wealth find the endless process of keeping up with technology change to be a distraction. The pace of change in underlying technology has increased to the point where it consumes too much attention that could be focused on the core business.

Businesses are not worried that sharing virtualized infrastructure in the cloud will provide an advantage to their competitors. They are worried about being slower than their competitors to get on a cloud bandwagon that provides an advantage. The shared commitment to a cloud environment will keep a company more up-to-date, without distracting from the core business, at a cost no more than it would have cost to do it themselves.

Whether SaaS, utility computing, web services in the cloud, platform as a service, or some other formulation, there are increasing opportunities to contract-out the job of keeping up with technology. Whether HP, IBM, Google, Amazon, or a wide range of providers focused on specific applications there are providers ready to contract for that service. With the pace of change speeding up and increasing opportunities to contract-out the risky business of keeping up, those old ideas delivered in new ways are going to be around for a lot longer.


(I mention RSTS and VM in the post above because of my first-hand exposure to them. I used RSTS in 1978 at school, working on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/34. I first encountered IBM’s VM in 1984 while working on Nixdorf computer’s 8890, an IBM 370-4300 plug compatible.)