Steve Jobs Was Using The Cloud Over 22 Years Ago, Now It's Our Turn!
June 4, 2011
It's pretty incredible how specifically focused Steve Jobs has been for so long. He is, in my estimation, the modern incarnation of the great Renaissance artists and scientists, bringing forward-thinking ideas to fruition through anticipation of and fervent working towards future technologies.
To that end, MacStories has an interesting throwback to 1997's WWDC Q&A, wherein Steve discusses many things, from Apple's greatest strength in its in-house hardware design to his own reliance on cloud computing some 22 years ago!
Check out the embedded video below. Since it's an hour long, I don't expect you to watch the whole thing. Instead, just start viewing at the 13:35 mark and pay attention for the next few minutes.
Transcribed below is one of the video's segments most germane to what we're expecting from Steve on Monday:
"We were able to take all of our personal data -- our "home directories" we call them -- off of our local machines and put them on a server. And the software made that completely transparent, and, because the server had a lot of RAM on it, in some cases it was actually faster to get stuff from the server than it was to get stuff off your local hard disk... I've got my stuff wherever I am. ...I don't need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to that server faster."
That sounds an awful lot like the idea pushing iCloud forward, and -- though onboard hard drives aren't likely to disappear any time soon -- Steve's been sticking to his guns about putting all or most of our data on remote servers, accessible with an internet connection from anywhere in the world. Naturally, there are limitations to the full adoption of total data streaming (network speeds, tiered pricing plans, and giant-sized video files, etc.), but -- with Steve's leadership -- we are getting there.
And June 6 will be yet another new beginning for Apple and our connected future.