my boss asked me this qn today and i realised i couldnt give a good answer. thanks to google, i arrived at Dennis Stevenson’s posting back in 2009. and being a computing person myself, i can instantly connect to the CLOUD in the network diagrams (:
so in short, CLOUD originate from network designs, and seen specifically in network diagrams. CLOUD is used to represent external unknown network, and the Internet. hence, CLOUD computing is literally Internet computing, which like what Stevenson’s mentioned, for e.g. we’re using google apps which are essentially internet apps, far far away from some unknown network (not that we’ll really care) existing in a corner of the internet network.
learnt another thing today (:
[credit: davedehetre via flickr / CC BY 2.0]