The Tym Before …

The Cloud! It sounds fluffy and soft. Amorphous, remote, floating above the world. Run it in the Cloud, we say. A modern metaphor, but we once had another name, a more descriptive name for using someone else's computer.

We called it timesharing.

Today we mix the idea of using distant computers and the idea of communicating via a network and call the combination The Cloud, imagining we have invented something new. But it isn't so new after all. Beginning in the 1960s, a company created a successful business making remote computer services available inexpensively to anyone via a network built for that purpose.

In doing so, they created the first cloud. Companies offered online resources from banking to research, email to instant messaging, and the ability to run applications on powerful, remote computers and access them from anywhere.

They called it Tymnet, and the company was Tymshare.