Vision of Computer Utility

In 1960, Professor Fano had a vision of computer utility, the concept of the computer system as a repository for the knowledge of a community, its data, and its procedures in a form that could be readily shared and that could be built upon to create ever more powerful procedures, services, and active knowledge by building on what was already in place. Professor Corbató’s goal was to provide the kind of central computer installation and operating system that could make this vision a reality. With funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the system he developed became known as MULTICS.

For those who, unlike me, are still under sixty and therefore are proba- bly not old enough to remember, MULTICS (an acronym for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system, started in 1964. It went live at MIT in 1969 and proved that (mainframe-based) computing could serve many people in remote locations at the same time. It set creative minds to thinking about a generally available computer utility, connected to your house through a cable. MULTICS remained operational right up to the dot.com era. Believe it or not, the last MULTICS system was not shut down until October 31, 2000. (See www.multicians.org for more information.)

Multics inspired far-reaching thoughts. I still have my original copy of Professor Fred Gruenberger’s influential book, Computers and Communica- tions; Toward a Computer Utility (Prentice-Hall, 1968), which I read when it first appeared. It was based in part on “The Computers of Tomorrow,” a May 1964 article in Atlantic Monthly by Martin Greenberger, another influ- ential computer scientist. Back then, I was an undergraduate, during an era characterized by pot-smoking, bra-burning, and anti-Vietnam War protests, and nearly all computing was still based on mainframes and batch process- ing. Punch cards were the norm for both programming and for data entry. Despite the prevailing limitations, Gruenberger looked at MULTICS and its teletype data entry terminals and saw far into the future. He imagined a

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“computing utility” that would operate much like an electrical utility, let- ting you draw as much or as little as you need, while paying only for con- sumption—what you use.

What he articulated in detail didn’t exist, except in his imagination. The technology wasn’t there. But now it does;we know it as cloud computing.

In 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, an expert in queuing theory and one of the chief scientists of the original Advanced Research Projects Agency Net- work (ARPANET) project which seeded the Internet, said: “As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of ‘computer utilities’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.”2

To appreciate the depth of this vision, let’s remember where things really were in those days.

Nearly all computing was still done with batch processing. Punched cards were the primary means of input. Time sharing was still in its infancy. As a 19-year old, back when Lyndon Johnson was still president, I read an article in Business Week which reported that all you needed to do to attract Figure 3.2 Honeywell H6180 MULTICS computer.

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venture capital funding was to stroll down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California (then, as now, home to some of the most prominent and success- ful venture capitalists) and shout “time-sharing.” Venture money would be poured on you. The idea back then was that we all needed slices of comput- ing “on-demand,” but only for short bursts of activity.

Back then the Teletype Model 33 was the “terminal” of choice; its printing speed was limited to about 10 characters per second. It could send Figure 3.3 Model 33 Teletype, including paper tape reader and printer (photo by

Allison W, on display at The National Museum of Computing, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License).

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data at a maximum rate of 300 bps and often used an acoustic coupler to connect it to a telephone handset. Later, faster models supported 30–120 characters per second. Like Bill Gates, I gained my first computing experi- ence on the Model 33.3

Of course, the slow speed limited the use of time-sharing to applica- tions requiring limited data entry and output. Payroll and sales data entry from branch offices, sales force management, light accounting, and model- ing were the prime applications.

Ultimately, however, the PC revolution put the kibosh on timesharing, for not as a modest, one-time investment users were no longer tethered to a money-guzzling mainframe via the maddeningly slow lines of communica- tion of that era—all the while being charged for it by the minute.

But while time-sharing died a slow and painful death, the concept behind timesharing, “hosted applications,” had enduring merit. As the world recognized that personal computers were not always appropriate or powerful enough, client/server applications became the next big thing, run- ning locally what could be processed on a personal computer, and using the back-end servers for the heavy lifting. This was followed by three-tier solu- tions.4 In 2004 (in the infancy of cloud computing), when the world first started talking about “hosted applications,” Laurie Sullivan noted in Infor- mation Week,5

“Hosted enterprise applications are nothing new. They first emerged as time-sharing apps in the 1960s, when companies rented hardware and software computing resources because they lacked the money and exper- tise to run applications internally. Among those to first offer such services were IBM and General Electric. The strategy eventually morphed into the [ASP] application-service-provider model in the late 1990s. The business model for both approaches failed, giving rise to the next itera- tion of hosted applications. The hosted, on-demand model is the third wave,” says Jim Shepherd, a senior VP at AMR Research. “The differ- ence is this time, heavy hitters like IBM and Oracle are pushing the

3. Bill Gates interview, National Museum Of American History, Smithsonian Institution http://amer- icanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm (accessed June 25, 2010).

4. Typical of the era was Sarna, David E. Y. and George J. Febish. “Building three tier client-server business solutions,” white paper, Object Soft. Corp., Englewood, NJ, 1995. (www-rcf.usc.edu/ ~anthonyb/ITP250/docs_pdf/Building3Tier.doc)

5. Laurie Sullivan, ”History 101: Hosted Apps, From Time-Sharing To On-Demand,” Information Week, June 21, 2004, accessed June 10, 2010. www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/ outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22100717.

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concept, so there’s no question as to whether it will survive. . . . The question now is, how big will it become?”

The answer? Very big indeed.

Utility computing, InfoWeek wrote years later, “is a [type of cloud com- puting that provides a] way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licens- ing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.”

That sure sounds like Gruenberger’s computer utility to me.

3.5 Desktop Virtualization

The first widespread use of virtualization was on the desktop. Companies tired of maintaining armies of technicians to tweak, fix, and upgrade desk- top PCs. Operating system migrations, PC replacements, operational PC costs, and PC security concerns had become major and unaffordable costs. Managers wanted a standardized environment. Even better, they wanted an environment that can physically sit in a closet or a room full of servers.

The two main vendors to jump on this bandwagon were Citrix and VMware. As the workforce became more mobile, the importance of remotely accessing a virtual desktop increased. Today’s desktop is really an end-user environment defined by a profile consisting of applications, docu- ments, and configuration data. As end users rely more and more on mobile devices such as laptops, smart phones, and removable storage drives, they need desktop environments that they can access anytime, anywhere. With the traditional “monolithic” desktop, the applications, operating system, and user data are all tied to a specific piece of hardware. Virtualization breaks the bonds between these elements into isolated layers, enabling IT staff to change, update, and deploy each component independently for greater business agility and improved response time. End users also benefit from virtualization because they get the same rich desktop experience, but with the added ability to access that computing environment from multi- tude of devices and access points in the office, at home, or on the road.

Virtual desktops are also superior to terminal services because they eliminate the headaches associated with application sharing and application compatibility. Instead of having to share a limited subset of applications that are compatible with terminal services, each end user gets a complete,

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standardized, and fully customizable desktop computing environment—a virtual machine. Each virtual desktop is completely isolated from other vir- tual machines, and IT administrators can provision and manage OS and application software just as they would with a traditional PC

Use of virtual desktops began about the turn of the millennium (2000) and are still a big deal. According to a June 2010 Morgan Stanley report,6 half of the CIOs surveyed plan to use desktop virtualization within twelve months, which the firm believes could double the reach of client virtualiza- tion. Morgan sees the VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) market growing to a $1.5 billion opportunity by 2014. This would represent a 67 percent compound annual growth rate. Not surprisingly, VMware and Citrix are expected to remain the dominant vendors behind that trend.