At one time, everybody stored their programs and information in some mysterious, far off, ill-defined entity.  It was called a “mainframe,” or sometimes just “the computer.”  Nobody stored anything locally: you really couldn’t, on a terminal.

So then we got microcomputers, or personal computers, or desktop machines.  And people stored everything locally.  And then found out that there were problems with not making backups, and getting viruses, and stuff like that.

In the mid-1990s, the Internet was getting big, thanks to this new technology called “the World Wide Web.”  And people started to make programs that ran in the application you used to access the Web, called a browser.  And all of a sudden people had this wonderful idea that you wouldn’t need to store your programs locally anymore, they could be stored, in bits and pieces, all over the Internet.  And so could your data!

And everyone who has ever looked at a network diagram knows what the Internet is.  It’s a cloud.

Well, when people started to actually try and store programs and data on the net (in the cloud) they got into a big fight over whether they would use a freely available and open technology, or one from The Vendor Who Controlled Everything–Trust Us.  And then they decided that maybe it really wasn’t that great an idea.

Until it came back with a new name …