The Hundred-Year Cycle Of Outsourced Computing
Techstrong.IT, Tuesday, March 31st, 2026
Tom Lyon showed us, at Cloud Field Day, that history has a funny way of repeating itself, especially when we think we've invented something entirely new. We talk about the cloud like it's a modern miracle, but a look at history shows we're just replaying a script from nearly a century ago.
The cloud isn't a destination or a specific technology. It's a business model. It's the latest version of the service bureau, a concept dating back to IBM in the 1930s. Back then, if you needed to process data, you didn't buy a room-sized mechanical tabulator. You took your punch cards to an IBM Service Bureau. You paid to use their machines and their expertise. You outsourced the complexity. Sound familiar? It should. It's exactly what happens when you spin up an instance on AWS today.