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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

The cloud symbol on network diagrams originally referred to any unspecified network whose details didn't matter to the diagram in question.

"Cloud" today is typically used with a more specific meaning, to refer to services such as IaaS or PaaS, which didn't exist in the 90s.

I don't remember encountering the word "cloud" in the 90s used in the way you describe. The cloud could be a symbol for a telephone network, a packet-switched network (including the internet), a company WAN, etc. Typically you'd refer to whatever the cloud symbol was supposed to represent, it wouldn't be called "the cloud" unless I suppose you were discussing the diagram itself.

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> whose details didn't matter to the diagram in question.

Exactly. Hence why services like AWS were said to be cloud services. The details not mattering was the value proposition being sold.

> PaaS, which didn't exist in the 90s.

It did, except we called it time-sharing back then.

> The cloud could be a symbol for a telephone network, a packet-switched network (including the internet), a company WAN, etc.

While you are right that the parent did specifically say internet, I am not sure there is a meaningful distinction anymore. Telephony, packet-switched networks, WANs, etc. are all, for the most part, a part of the internet now. The exceptions are exceptional and thus can be ignored.

Calling time-sharing “PaaS” makes essentially the same mistake as calling pre-IaaS systems “cloud”.

First, that’s not what they were called at the time.

Second, those older systems aren’t what either term actually refers to.

(Selling time on a mainframe would be closer to IaaS than PaaS anyway - in fact IBM’s VM/CMS even used the VM abstraction, which compute in most IaaS environments depend on.)

Your position only works if you ignore the actual extant definitions of what “cloud” or “PaaS” actually refer to.

We have, according to another commenter, what cloud actually refers to: "Cloud kind of means that it's a service hosted somewhere on the Internet, that you don't control directly"

Which is what, back when network diagrams were still cool, would have been drawn as a a cloud — something that your network depends on, but something whose details don't matter. And what one would have called a cloud if they were talking about said diagram.

The word didn't magically appear out of nowhere. These services were named cloud services because that's what name we had already reserved for them.

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