Time-sharing and remote job entry were also reasonable back in the day. You bought time on a computer to run workloads. I don't think they fit so well with the "cloud computing" model in a modern sense technically, but I do envy them for being descriptive, logical terms that describe what is going on. We got the cloud from Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said to a conference in 2006
> What’s interesting is that there is an emergent new model. I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing — they should be in a “cloud” somewhere. . . . And so what's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising.
- https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
It's strange to me that as engineers we accept and even promote marketing language such as this.