Shortly after Apple purchased NeXT (the company that Steve Jobs formed after resigning from Apple in 1984, which Apple later purchased in December 1996), Steve Jobs was invited to host a Q&A section at the 1997 WWDC – At one point, he provided some discussion about what we now call cloud computing – very interesting, considering the impending release of iCloud.
Among other things, a very loose, open, relaxed Steve Jobs hit it out of the park with the following comment:
“Let me describe the world I live in. About eight years ago we had high-speed networking connected to our NeXT hardware. Because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data — our “home directory” we called them — off of our local machines and put them on a server. The software made that completely transparent…a professional could be hired to back up that server every night.
In the last seven years, do you know how many times I lost any personal data? Zero. Do you how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero.
I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.”
You can see the entire video below, with the relevant cloud stuff showing up around the 13 minute mark.
Personally, I’ve been waiting a very long time for this sort of technology to come to consumer-level Macs – the ability to log in to any Mac, anywhere, and access my own desktop, settings, and perhaps even software!
Steve Jobs – your vision knows no bounds.
