Journey into the cloud: The next 50 years of computing will be eventful

With applications increasingly escaping the corporate world to become a means of entertainment, self-expression and communication, the next 50 years are sure to be even more eventful. PHOTO | TEA GRAPHIC 

By Mark Walker

In Summary

• The upshot has been the proliferation of Internet exchange points and rural connectivity projects during the intervening years, while numerous major undersea cables have also entered into operation.

On April 7, 1964, while the Beatles were telling the world that “money can’t buy me love,” IBM was trying to convince the business community that it could at least buy you a decent mainframe.

The IBM System/360 — touted as the Big Blue’s most innovative iteration to date — had just been announced, and since then the technology industry has changed in extraordinary ways, shaping the way we live, work and play. The impact on Africa has been profound, with the continent and its people now connected with each other and the rest of the world in ways that could not have been imagined only a decade or so ago.

But how did the connectivity we now all take for granted first come about?

For 17 years after the System/360 launch, the world of technology was living its First Platform. In this world, mainframes reigned supreme, and just a few million enterprise users on the planet had access to them via terminals.

Throughout this era and way into the subsequent one, all computer-related activity was restricted to the interaction between a person and a computer. However, such interaction was never of a personal nature. This would only change after the end of the First Platform, although the event that made this transformation possible happened during that era —in 1973, to be precise, the year Bob Metcalfe broke new tech ground by inventing Ethernet at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre.

Fast forward to 1981 and the tech world was taking its first tentative steps onto the Second Platform. This was the age of the server-client model and the personal computer — the device that, together with the Ethernet and the local and wide area networks it made possible, brought about the personalisation of information technology.

And when PCs started becoming more interconnected around 1983, we quickly moved into a world where one of the most incredible creations ever imagined — e-mail — started being used to share company information online from different places on earth.

From this point, we move 10 years into the future. CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) is set to redefine the whole world as we know it by creating a global hypertext system and making it available to the public as the World Wide Web.

This spurred one of the most amazing leaps in technology: We went beyond sharing company documents with specific people to sharing personal data with complete strangers. Blogging was born, and was soon to be followed by a personal data-generation and sharing revolution.

The 25 years of the Second Platform era were characterised by an exponential increase in the number of users and applications. Users went from millions to hundreds of millions and applications went from thousands to tens of thousands. Still, the computing industry was focused on the enterprise, and personal usage of computers was secondary. Its progress would come as a result of advances in enterprise systems and applications.

In 2007, the iPhone and Google Apps were launched and Amazon and Salesforce.com began offering their cloud services. At this time, both Hadoop and Twitter were only around a year old, while Facebook had just become available to the public several months earlier. These were the seeds of what we now recognise as the main trends in technology adoption today: Mobility, cloud computing, big data analytics and social media. In other words, the Third Platform.

The year 2007 also signalled an exciting new era of connectivity across Africa. In October that year, Rwanda hosted the Connect Africa summit with the aim of expanding the continent’s broadband backbone infrastructure and access networks. Pledges totalling $55 billion were announced during the conference, with national and regional interconnectivity initiatives taking centre stage in a bid to ensure that Africa capitalised on the broadband and ICT opportunities already being taken for granted elsewhere in the world.

The upshot has been the proliferation of Internet exchange points and rural connectivity projects during the intervening years, while numerous major undersea cables have also entered into operation.

Spearheaded by the Kenyan government, TEAMs (The East African Marine System) cable began service in 2009, connecting the country to the rest of the world via the UAE, and the following year EASSy (Eastern African Submarine Cable System) brought widespread connectivity to the wider East Africa region, with landing points in nine countries along the coast and connections to at least 10 landlocked nations.

Three years later, West Africa got into the act with the WACS cable connecting South Africa to the UK via 12 landing points along the western coast.