Electronic clouds

The defense department invented dispersion of computer documents as a tool for national defense in case of a nuclear attack or other large disaster.  If copies of important files were in many places, it would closer to impossible to destroy them all.  That arrangement and Sir Berners-Lee's invention of computer communication between scientists and computers in multiple places helped create the modern world-wide web.  The first computers available to the average buyer grew up separately from the internet and the www.  The coupling of a tv-type monitor with a keyboard allowed typed documents to be created and corrected until they were deemed satisfactory before committing them to paper and ink.  Shortly after, some smart accounting students saw the possibility of using a similar arrangement to create financial and mathematical statements that used the memory of the computer for math processes and the ease of modification and correction of the monitor-keyboard, leading to the spreadsheet of today.

Because of the way our minds work, we tend to extend what we know and do regularly more easily than we get into some rather new sort of method.  Thus, many people are more comfortable with a pen and pad of paper than using [after learning to use] a computer and related devices.  But, it is dawning on many through use and thought, that information stored in computer files can do valuable things that marks on paper can do.  Throw in the mobility of modern people and you get a situation where one desires all the file cabinets and picture albums to be at hand but faces the impossibility and trouble of hauling things all over the place.  Thus, computing today takes a form where I create a file through the wires and the atmosphere at some location and can then tap into that file to edit or calculate or copy or modify from multiple places.  In fact, I can do it any place that my computer can connect to the internet or my smartphone can.   Easy access from multiple places is being called "cloud computing" to give it short descriptive name.  My email and that of my correspondents, my blog and web pages, my Picasa albums and YouTube videos are housed in the clouds somewhere.  They can be used from all over the planet.  Cool!