[Ads-l] Question About OED Entry for "Cloud"

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The OED citation for "cloud computing" is the following:

[Begin OED excerpt]
1996
Cloud Computing: The Cloud has no Borders.
Internal Document (Compaq Computer Corp.) 29 October in Technol.
Review (2011) 31 October
[End OED excerpt]

The text contains both "Cloud Computing" and "The Cloud"; hence, Fred
seems to be correct that this citation should fit both terms.

I accessed scans of Technology Review magazine, and I looked at the
September/October 2011 issue. (The magazine was a bimonthly not a
monthly in 2011.) Nothing was pertinent.

The OED citation refers to the Technology Review website and not the magazine.

Date: October 31, 2011
Article Title: Who Coined 'Cloud Computing'?
Author: Antonio Regalado
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/10/31/257406/who-coined-cloud-computing/

[Begin excerpt]
O'Sullivan thinks it could have been his idea—after all, why else
would he later try to trademark it? He was also a constant presence at
Compaq’s Texas headquarters at the time. O'Sullivan located a daily
planner, dated October 29, 1996, in which he had jotted down the
phrase "Cloud Computing: The Cloud has no Borders" following a meeting
with Favaloro that day. That handwritten note and the Compaq business
plan, separated by two weeks, are the earliest documented references
to the phrase “cloud computing” that Technology Review was able to
locate.
[End excerpt]

So the existence of the phrase in 1996 is based on the credibility of
the testimony of a "young technologist named Sean O'Sullivan". What
did O'Sullivan mean when he wrote "The Cloud"? It is plausible to me
that he meant something similar to the modern computing concept of the
cloud.

The OED has an entry for a sense of "cloud" that was already in use in
telecommunications in 1989. The sense of this pre-existing term was
probably extended to yield the modern sense.

[Begin excerpt from OED]
Additional sense (2012)
a. Telecommunications. A network operated by a telecommunications
service provider, used in routing data between different local
networks.
The image of a cloud is often used to represent such networks in diagrams.

1989 It [is] especially capable of virtual net management, in which—to
use the lightning bolt analogy—some user-transparent routing and
transport is taking place through the public network cloud.
Network World 19 June 47/1
[End excerpt]

I found an interesting 1990 citation containing the phrase "sometimes
called the cloud", but it fits the telecommunications sense which
preceded the closely related computing sense.

Date: 1990 Copyright
Book Title: Mastering Novell NetWare
Author: Cheryl C. Currid
Chapter 20
Quote Page 310

https://archive.org/details/masteringnovelln00curr/page/269/mode/thumb?q=%22the+cloud%22

[Begin excerpt]
For sophisticated WANs, public data networks (PDNs) are a more
effective approach. PDNs, such as Tymnet or Telenet, use the X.25
communications protocol to send data through a packet-switched
network. The X.25 communications protocol was developed as an
international communications standard for accessing packet-switched
networks. Service users access the packet-switched network (sometimes
called the cloud) through a dedicated line or by dialing the network
using a standard modem. You can use an X.25 gateway to connect an
entire LAN to a PDN.
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 12:48 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> I am not very knowledgeable about computer technology, but I notice that the OED entry for "cloud computing" has a first citation from 1996 that not only illustrates "cloud computing" but also seems to illustrate "the cloud."  The OED entry for "cloud" (sense b.) has a first citation from 1997.  Shouldn't the 1996 citation s.v. "cloud computing" also be the first citation for "cloud" sense b. ?
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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