Popularised in the early 2000s, the phrase ‘cloud computing’ had been around for decades before that. The symbol of a cloud was used to represent networks of computing equipment back in the 1970s. By the 1990s, the term ‘cloud’ was being used to refer to platforms for distributed computing. In the 1960s, time-sharing allowed users to get access to computers over a phone line, with the cost of the hardware distributed across multiple customers.. The launch of AWS’s web-based computing infrastructure services brought cloud computing into the mainstream.

Listed below are the major milestones in the journey of the cloud computing theme, as identified by GlobalData.

1946 – ENIAC, the first electronic general purpose computer, was switched on to calculate artillery firing tables.

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1954 – The first fully transistorised computer was completed in the US.

1964 – IBM launched the System/360 family of mainframe computer systems.

1971 – Intel released the 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor.

1973 – Xerox introduced the Alto, the first computer designed to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface.

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1977 – The world’s first commercially available local area network went into service at Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

1984 – Sun Microsystems developed the network file system protocol, enabling users to access files over a network.

1989 – UK computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

1999 – VMware released VMware Workstation, allowing users to set up virtual machines.

1999 – Cloud-based software company Salesforce was founded.

2002 – Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched as a free service.

2006 – AWS started offering web-based computing infrastructure services, now known as cloud computing.

2007 – Apple launched the first iPhone, creating the mobile internet as we know it today.

2007 – IBM partnered with Google to promote cloud computing in universities.

2008 – Google announced App Engine, a developer tool that allowed users to run web applications on Google infrastructure.

2010 – Microsoft released Azure, its cloud computing service.

2011 – IBM introduced the SmartCloud framework.

2011 – Facebook launched the Open Compute Project (OCP) to share specifications for energy efficient data centres.

2013 – Docker introduced open source container software.

2015 – Google and Microsoft lead massive build outs of data centres.

2017 – Huawei and Tencent joined Alibaba in major data centre build-outs in China.

2018 – Leading data centre operators started the migration to 400G data speeds.

2018 – Silicon photonics technology started to positively impact data centre networking architectures.

2020 – Edge computing will revise the role of the cloud in key sectors of the economy.

2021 – Data centre speeds are expected to exceed 1,000G.

2024 – GlobalData forecasts that spending on cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) will be more than $429bn.

This is an edited extract from the Cloud Computing – Thematic Research report produced by GlobalData Thematic Research.