Paul L. McCord Jr.

The Cloud

There is a phrase that is being used more and more these days with reference to remote data storage over the Internet called “Cloud Computing” or “The Cloud” for short.  This phrase is often referring to images we have all seen when someone draws a computer network.  They often draw this cloud in the corner where a person’s network connects.  This cloud is the Internet.  Why do they call it a cloud?  This can be answered by the unknown quantity that the Internet represents.  The Internet has matured to a point that people are looking for more innovative ways to use it.  This just happens to coincide with the dramatic drop in the cost of data storage whether by hard drives or flash drives.

Today a person can buy a hard drive the size that no one could have imagined five years ago for less than $100.00 in some cases.  I have seen two terabyte drives at Wal-Mart.  For those that are unfamiliar with a terabyte, I will have to give you a bit of computer background so you can get some perspective.  Most of us have heard the term “bit” or “bits”.  This is a term referring to a binary digit.  Binary is nothing more than a different numbering system that is based on two instead of ten.  Most of us know that our decimal numbering system goes up to nine before carrying over to another digit making “10”.  Well binary is the same way except it goes up to one before carrying over another digit.  For example you would count. 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111 and so on.  As you can see, it is based on two.  Well a binary digit or bit is the means of measuring data.  For each letter of the alphabet, or number to be expressed, it takes approximately eight binary digits of data, or a byte.  One byte is eight binary digits and is the data required to store one letter of the alphabet, or ASCII character.

As you probably remember the metric system from high school  a kilo is 1000 units of anything.  A mega is 1,000,000 or one million.  A Giga is 1,000,000,000 or one billion units.  A tera is 1,000,000,000,000 or one trillion units of something.  Since data storage is expressed in bytes, this storage of one terabyte is really approximately 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.  This is an enormous number that is difficult visualize.

Now that data storage prices have dropped so much, there are companies offering data storage remotely over the Internet.  In some cases they have services that back up your own data over the Internet in small increments while your Internet is idle.  As we have seen with services like Google Docs, and Windows Live Sky Drive, these services are becoming mainstream.  There are benefits to this because a person may have critical photos, music, or videos on their computer that would be a tragedy if lost.  By storing things remotely, it helps keep them from being lost if a person’s house catches fire or hit by a tornado.  I have been doing this for quite some time with my photos.  I have more than 20,000 photos on my computer and currently over 7,000 of them are stored on Flickr.com.

They refer to this activity as cloud computing and has become a standard term.  The problem is that I am not an ordinary person and have a difficult time seeing the Internet when people say “The Cloud”.  I have two teenage sons that often do things like pass gas as they walk through the house and then tell you that you just walked through their cloud as you walk through the room.  Since this has happened many times, I tend to think unpleasant things when people refer to the cloud.  This is not a good thing because I am around computer enthusiasts on a regular basis. find myself reaching for the Febreeze every time they start talking about cloud computing.  Am I too far gone?  I still hold out hope that one day I will get passed the trauma.  I would like to suggest changing the name so that I can engage in computer speak without thinking of toilets.  How about calling it “The Internet”?

I know that most people from more refined backgrounds are thinking to themselves about a thunderstorm, or even a Spring day when someone refers to clouds.  I guess I could use some more refinement but I am what I am.  It was destined to happen when I was an aircraft maintenance person in the Air Force for many years.  If you have ever been one you probably know what I am talking about.  Being in the military requires you to have some thick skin and have a sense of humor to deal with the long hours of working on the flight line in less than ideal conditions.  I guess I am doomed to being an unrefined Neanderthal incapable of rational thought.  I need to accept who I am.  Can I keep my computer though?