Virtualizing buzzword compliance

The words of the day are "virtualization" and "cloud computing". The idea behind them is that actual computing -- CPUs crunching through instructions, databases being updated on permanent storage, nuts and bolts computing -- can happen in data centers instead of on people's desktops.

It's "virtual" because the chunk of computing resources you're using is not necessarily tied to any particular physical machine, much less the particular machine on your desktop, on your lap or in your handset. It's "cloud computing" because you neither know care where the actual computing is taking place. It's happening somewhere out in "the cloud".

I first heard someone talk about "the cloud" many years ago, back when bang paths still walked the earth. At the time I was accessing the internet, sort of, by dialing into a friend's system at his lab. That box was connected to more-connected boxes at the university, which in turn were connected to similar boxes at other sites, and so forth. In other words, to connect box A to box B, you had to know at least something about how to get from one to another.

Or, you could get a newfangled connection into "the cloud". If box A and box B both had such a connection, you could go directly from one to the other. Any intermediate connections happened "in the cloud". In other words, it was exactly the kind of connection everyone has today.

I first heard about virtualization even longer ago, though not under that name, in a high school class on business computing. And by business computing I mean COBOL, RPG, radix-sorting of Hollerith cards and similar specimens from adjoining strata. At one point we had a real live computing professional come in and explain to us how a real business computer worked.

He explained that it could be a problem to have, say, everyone trying to print on the same printer at the same time (and by printer I mean a beer-fridge-sized box chewing through wide-format green-and-white-striped fanfold paper). But, he went on, with a little magic in the operating system you could say "disk drive, you're a printer". The print job would sit in a queue on the disk drive until a printer was free and then it would print. If you had five paper-spewing beer fridges, you could divvy the work up among them without caring which one was going to actually print any particular job. Print spooling, in other words.

That was an eye-opener. The task of printing was separated from exactly where or when the printing took place.

At the same time, in a different class, I could dial into the "time sharing system" at the university and hook up to what looked like my own personal computer (and by hook up, I mean dial up at 110 baud by mashing a phone receiver into a foam receptacle). It ran whatever program I told it to, it remembered my files from last time, and so forth. Except it wasn't actually my own computer. I was really sharing one room-sized computer with everyone else and the computer's operating system was multitasking amongst us (here's a bit more from those days).

That seemed like a really neat trick, and it still does.

Now, you can read this sort of "nothing new under the sun" spiel one of two ways. One is "All this 'cloud computing' and 'virtualization' stuff was done years ago. There's nothing to it." The other is "The basic ideas behind 'cloud computing' and 'virtualization' are so old and useful we forget they're even there until someone drums up a marketing campaign to remind us."

I tilt toward the lattter.