"Ever wonder where the cloud came from?" Aria asked, flipping through her notes.
"I mean, it’s just... there now," Jalen replied. "But I’ve never really thought about the history."
"That’s what’s wild," she said. "Cloud computing didn’t just appear. It evolved from decades of tech progress."
"Okay, now you’ve got my attention. Walk me through it."
The Origins: Time-Sharing in the 1960s
"So it all started back in the 1960s," Aria began. "Mainframes were expensive. Companies couldn’t afford one for every department."
"So they shared?"
"Exactly. It was called time-sharing. One massive computer was accessed by multiple users through dumb terminals."
"Kind of like the earliest form of cloud computing."
"Right. It set the foundation—shared access to a central computing resource."
"Weird to think of that as high-tech."
"At the time, it was revolutionary."
The Internet Makes It Possible
"Then what happened?"
"Fast-forward to the late '90s," Aria said. "The internet goes mainstream. Bandwidth improves. Suddenly, remote computing becomes practical."
"That’s when hosting providers started popping up."
"Exactly. But we were still mostly renting physical servers. The idea of scalable virtual infrastructure hadn’t matured yet."
"So this was the setup phase."
"The tech was catching up to the vision."
Amazon Changes the Game
"Then came Amazon Web Services in 2006," Aria continued. "They offered EC2—virtual servers on demand."
"That was the real turning point, right?"
"Yes. For the first time, developers could spin up servers in minutes and pay by the hour."
"That must’ve felt like magic."
"It was game-changing. It’s why so many startups were born in the cloud."
"They didn’t need data centers anymore."
"Just a credit card and a login."
The Rise of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS
"After AWS, the cloud exploded," Aria said. "Google, Microsoft, IBM—they all joined the race."
"And we got acronyms. Lots of them."
"SaaS—software as a service. PaaS—platform. IaaS—infrastructure. Hosting shifted from hardware to service models."
"So now you don’t just rent a server. You rent capabilities."
"Exactly. Hosting, databases, AI tools—everything is a service now."
"And it's all in the cloud."
"That’s the evolution."
What Comes Next?
"So where does it go from here?" Jalen asked.
"Edge computing is the big trend now," Aria said. "Processing data closer to where it’s generated."
"To reduce latency."
"Exactly. And then there’s serverless architecture. You don’t manage servers at all—you just deploy code."
"So we’re moving from infrastructure to pure execution."
"That’s the future. More abstraction, more automation, more global."
"Makes me wonder what comes after the cloud."
"Maybe the fog."
"You’re not serious."
"Totally. Fog computing is a real thing. But that’s a conversation for another time."
