Clouds, cables, and the problem of finding the right department.
One of the stranger things about early internet infrastructure was where you sometimes ended up working.
In our case, the airport offered a particularly interesting environment.
There were aviation operations, technical equipment and offices connected with meteorological work.
And then there was us.
The internet people.
At the time, nobody was talking about cloud computing the way they do today.
Servers were actual machines.
They lived in actual rooms.
They had actual power cables.
And when something broke, an actual human being generally had to go and look at it.
Still, imagine the confusion if somebody had walked into the hangar asking for the cloud department.
"Which one?"
"The cloud department."
"Right. Are we talking about the internet or the weather?"
"The computers."
"That doesn't narrow it down as much as you'd think."
One department studied what happened in the atmosphere.
The other tried to move information through it.
Both probably had a healthy appreciation for the difference between theoretical performance and actual conditions.
Same hangar. Different kind of cloud computing.