Tosca

The hidden implications of cloud computing, as set out in Tom Slee’s able review of To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, warrant a Canadian footnote on the origins of this technology. Beginning in the 1970s, several Canadian data companies provided an early version of cloud computing, except they called it “shared processing.” One of the pioneers was Richard G. Taylor, who founded Datacrown as a retailer of surplus cycles from Crown Life’s massive (for that era) IBM System/370 computers.

My PR/ad agency was retained to help Datacrown convince conservative corporate executives that it was more economical and efficient to access its computers than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrading their own machines. The introduction of “virtual memory” on the System/370s, allowing vastly greater storage and processing capacity, accelerated this trend. We created various campaigns to overcome customer concerns, including security. I headlined one of our ads: “Anything your computer can do, our computer can do. Better.”

Many of the Canadian computer service companies were later subsumed into IBM. The philosophy of that ad, however, continues as a hallmark of cloud computing with its promise to relieve the user of worries about capacity, cost and security.