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Technology Tap
Technology Tap
History of Modern Computing : Cloud, Unboxed
What if the world’s hard drives merged into one invisible place—and you used it a hundred times today without thinking? We pull back the curtain on cloud storage, tracing its unlikely path from room-sized machines and punch cards to AWS’s game-changing S3, Dropbox’s frictionless sync, and the moment Netflix stopped shipping envelopes and started streaming the future. Along the way, we unpack why storage got so cheap, how reliability reached “eleven nines,” and where the hidden risks still live.
We start with J.C.R. Licklider’s radical idea—computing as a utility—and follow the thread through ARPANET, early hosting, and the price freefall that turned terabytes into pocket change. Then we shift from enterprise to everyday life: the folder that follows you everywhere, photos that back up before you can worry, and classrooms that collaborate across continents. But convenience has a cost, and we tackle it head on: infamous breaches, painful outages, and the reality that all clouds are built on real servers, power grids, and people. You’ll hear how modern security—encryption by default, MFA, redundancy—raised the bar, and why good hygiene still starts with you.
The story crescendos with Netflix’s bold pivot: betting on bandwidth, partnering with AWS for storage and compute, and building Open Connect to put content near viewers. That playbook—rent the core, own the edge—reshaped entertainment and proved what elastic infrastructure makes possible. We also confront the environmental bill for our “infinite” drive: data centers’ energy appetite, the race to renewables, and why the next leap must be cleaner, not just faster and cheaper. Finally, we look ahead to decentralized storage, edge computing, and AI-guided data management—and face the paradox of abundance: when everything can be saved, deletion becomes a superpower.
If this journey sharpened how you think about the files you trust to the sky, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Tell us: what do you trust the cloud with—and what will you delete today?
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.
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Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
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ProfessorJRod@gmail.com
@Prof_JRod
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Welcome to the technology. This is a few light of the final. All right, welcome back to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J. Rod. For those of you who don't know us, I am a real college professor and I like to help students pass their A, network plus, and Security Plus exam. I also am a little bit of a history buff. So what I'm doing now with these podcasts is I'm doing lessons on A, lessons on Security Plus, and then on Sundays I drop uh, you know, a history of computing. Since history is uh you know a little bit of a hobby of mine that I like doing. So hopefully you're enjoying these. I do these three three days a week. I record them the same day and then I I release them in on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. So if you're listening to this, this is for the first time that I release it. It's probably be on a Sunday. And usually Sundays is the history one that I like to do. So welcome back. Sit back and let's learn about the rise of the cloud. So today we're gonna explore a world that you can't see, you can't touch, then you rely on it every single day. You save a document, share a photo, back up your phone, and somewhere out there in a vast network of machines you never ever visit, your data lives and breathes. We call it the cloud. But what is it? Who built it? How did it go from a niche concept in the 60s to the foundation of modern life? And how did something that once called thousands of dollars per month become free for billions of people? Today we'll journey through the birth, growth, and dominance of cloud storage, the invisible architecture of our digital age. Let's rewind to the early 1960s. Computers filled a room, they hummed the world and demanded punch cards. A computer was not personal, it was institutional. But a few visionary thinkers imagined something radical. What if computing power could be delivered like electricity as a utility? That idea came from JCR Lickleiter, a psychologist technologist who worked for ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency. Lickleiter dreamed of an intergalactic computer network, machines linked together, sharing data and applications over long distance. That sounds familiar, right guys? Now it's called the Internet. In 1962, the cloud was still a dream, but the dream had a name, connectivity. As networks evolved through the 70s and 80s, ARPNET, NSFnet, and finally the early internet, storage stayed physical. Hard drives spun in offices, backups lived on tape. If your building caught fire, so did your data, but everything was about to change. In the 1990s, companies began experimenting with hosting. You can rent a web server, a physical machine, in someone else's data center, and store your files there. This was the first taste of what we later called cloud storage. Early services like XDrive launched in 1999 and iDrive offered small amounts of online space. Their prices about$20 a month for 50 megs. That's one PowerPoint deck today. One PowerPoint deck by today's standard. The cloud began not with a storm but a drizzle, a few megabytes falling from the sky. Then came 2006, the year the sky truly opened up. In 2006, Amazon Web Server AWS launched S3, Simple Storage Service. At the time, Amazon was best known from selling books. Behind the scenes, though, its engineers have built a powerful internal infrastructure to manage millions of customers' requests every day. Someone inside asked the million-dollar question if this system can store your data, why not everybody's? AWS S3 was born. It was the first true commercial cloud storage platform. Scalable, programmable, pay as you go, you only pay for what you use. Initial price in 2006 was 15 cents per gigabyte per month and 20 cents per gigabyte downloaded. Compare that to$20 for 50 meg from a decade earlier, a 99.9% collapse. AWS made storage or service. Developers no longer bought servers, they rented space in the sky. Startups can launch without ever owning hardware or paying a tech, right? Which is always a big thing. Not having to worry about security, not having to worry about patches, like that's a lot of money being saved. AWS didn't just change pricing, it changed possibilities. While AWS empowered business, the rest of us needed something simple. A folder that follows us everywhere. In 2007, two MIT students, Drew Houston and Arish Ferdashi, launched Dropbox. The story goes that Houston kept forgetting his USB drive and thought, why can't my files just be everywhere I am? Dropbox made syncing invisible. Drag a file into a folder on one computer and it magically appears on another. Early plans, price plans in 2008, 2 gigabits free tier and$9.99 per month for a 50 gig Pro account. Today, 2TB cost you$11.99 per month, and a price plan with unlimited storage go around$20 per user. Dropbox did for storage what Gmail did for email. It made it personal, seamless, and invisible. Soon the race was on. 2012 Google Drive, 15 gig free, backed by Google's massive server farms. Microsoft OneDrive 2014 built into Windows and Office 365. Apple iCloud 2011 integrated into iPhones and the Mac ecosystem. The cloud went mainstream. By 2015, even grandparents were backing up photos automatically without realizing they were using the same technology that powered Fortune 500 companies. The cloud stopped being a destination and became default. Now let's talk numbers because the economics of cloud storage are fascinating as the technology itself. In 2006, AWS charged 15 cents per gigabyte. By 2025, that price has fallen to 0.05 per gigabyte, a ten-fold drop. Our terabyte of online storage that once cost 150 now costs$15 or less. Customers' plans follow suit. 2008, Dropbox, 50 GB, 999 a month. 2012, Google Drive, 100GB, 499 a month. 2025, 2TB,$9.99 a month from Google. In 2025, iCloud 2TB is$9.99. In 2005, AWS S3, 1 TB for business use, is$15 total storage plus usage fee. Every decade, a zero disappears from the bill. Cloud providers can charge so little because they achieve economies of scale. A single data center can store hundreds of petabytes with power efficiency no individual company could match. But that scale comes with a new cost, dependence. When data leaves your hard drive and enters somebody else's responsibility and sometimes someone else's risk. The first major cloud breach hit in 2011 when Sony's PlayStation Network was hacked, exposing millions of accounts and credit cards. Later that year, Amazon AWS ouledge knocked hundreds of websites offline for hours, from Reddit to Quora. Each incident reminded us that the cloud is still a physical place with servers, power grids, and humans who make mistakes. Then came the Dropbox Breach of 2012, the Apple Cloud Photo Incident of 2014, and the Capital One AWS misconfiguration of 2019. Each story underscores the same lesson: convenience without security is a trap. We moved our data to the sky and they realized it still casts a shadow. That's why modern clouds encrypt data in transit and at rest, use multi-factor authentication, and distributed redundant copies across continents. Amazon boasts an 119s availability. That's 99.99999999% data retention. In theory, you can store a million files from 100 years and lose only one. The cloud never forgets, and that's both a feature and a warning. Today, cloud storage is not a service, it's an infrastructure of civilization. Governments archive records on AWS GovCloud. Netflix streams from Amazon servers. Apple backs up 2 billion iPhones through iCloud. Google Drive houses billions of documents created by students and teachers worldwide. In 2025, there are 7 million data centers around the world, from Oregon to Dublin to Johannesburg, each one a cathedral of light and electricity. The cloud has no nation, yet it touches them all. Of course, storing everything in the sky still has a cost, an environmental one. Data centers consume about 2% of the global electricity. Companies like Google and Microsoft are investing in solar and wind power, even underwater cooling projects to cut heat. In 2023, Microsoft pledged to run all Azure data centers at 100% renewable energy by 2030. Amazon announced its climb pledge data centers carbon neutral by 2030. The next evolution of cloud storage isn't faster or cheaper. It's cleaner. Yeah, they the the whole world is worried about that with the cloud, that it's the electricity that it's consuming. This thing consumes a lot of electricity. And more and more people, more and more, not only people companies are becoming more and more dependent on the cloud. And it's a you know it's a concern. Like how do we how do we conserve energy that we need instead of giving it to the cloud? And and my own concern is, you know, what it's not a question of of if, it's when the lights go out. What's gonna happen with all that data? Right? If you have data in a different comp country and the lights go out, won't you be afraid about your data? I mean, this is you know, there's a lot of things. We everybody likes new and fancy things. And it's nice. But once they get it, then they realize, oh, wait a minute. Right? And then and I'll give you the perfect example. Like I'm going through it right now with the liquid glass on on Apple. It's great, it looks nice, but man, it's clunky. It's it's clunky. So, you know, we we all waited for that. We all wanted them to have a uh a decent upgrade, and now that they did it, I'm not happy with it. Alright, let's continue. Think about how the cloud changed daily life. Students collaborate on Google Docs in real time from different continents. Families share photo albums that auto-update across devices. Podcasters like me upload videos to the cloud so listeners everywhere can press play instantly. Entire industries exist because storage no longer limits imagination. Netflix and Spotify streaming, Zoom meetings, cloud gaming platforms, AI training data sets spanning petabytes. The cloud turned computing from a product into a place. Now what comes next? The cloud is already shifting towards decentralized storage and edge computing. Projects like SOAR, Filecoin, and IPFS use blockchain technologies to distribute data across independent nodes. Instead of trusting one giant company, your files are broken into pieces and stalled around the world, encrypted, redundant, and resistant. Meanwhile, AI drives intelligent storage, systems that predict which files you need before you even open it. And quantum storage reach is pushing the limits of physics, storing bits of information in atoms and photons. We used to ask where our data was, now we ask what it would become. Here's a paradox. We made storage so cheap that we hardly think about it. But our digital footprint never stops growing. In 2000, humanity stored 40 exabytes data in total. By 2025, we'll cross 200 zatabytes. At a penny per gigabyte, the mask still works, but the planet feels the weight. When storage becomes infinite, what becomes precious is deletion. Alright, let's talk about a company that made a big change to this cloud and it was a big success. It's 2001. Netflix is a runaway success. They have 4 million subscribers, they're emailing a million DVDs per day. And their red envelopes are as iconic as the Coca-Cola cans. Each disc travels from one of 40 distribution centers across America. It's a ballet of logistics, scanning, sorting, sealing, and shipping. Every envelope costs 78 cents in postage and handling, but customers love it. Movies at your doorstep, no late fees, no waiting in line. For Netflix, it was comfortable, profitable, predictable, but Reed Hastings, the co-founder and CEO, wasn't interested in comfort. He was looking at something else, something invisible. If a business waits until change is obvious, then it's already too late. Around the same time, the internet was quietly gaining faster. In 2000, the average home connection ran at 56 kilobits per second. Enough for email, barely enough for images. By 2005, broadband has leaped to 2 megabytes per second. Not blazing speed by today's standards, but enough to do something remarkable. Stream a movie. Hastings saw the numbers. He saw that every year more households were moving from dollop to broadband. And he asked himself a radical question. What happens when the internet speeds are fast enough to deliver a video instantly? Technology doesn't wait for permission. It moves at the speed of curiosity. He knew that if Netflix didn't embrace streaming, someone else would. Inside Netflix, not everyone agreed. DVDs was still booming, customers loved the red envelope. Streaming felt risky. The infrastructure, the rights, the playback technologies, all uncertain. But Hastings put forward, pushed forward. He wasn't just becoming betting on Netflix, he was betting on the internet itself. In meetings, he would say, we're not a DVD company. We're a delivery company. DVDs are today's delivery system. Streaming is tomorrow. Leaders don't predict the future, they prepare for it. In 2007, Netflix faced a technical mountain. If they're going to stream videos to millions of users, they need data centers, massive ones. Servers to store servers to host terabytes of movies, networks to handle millions of simultaneous requests, storage system to never lose a single customer file. Building that from scratch would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So Netflix turned to another company that was quietly reinventing itself. Just a year earlier, Amazon had launched Amazon Web Services, a cloud platform that rented out competing power and storage to other companies. Netflix saw a perfect fit. Instead of buying physical servers, they will rent digital space in the cloud. AWS would hold Netflix growing library. AWS EC2 will process requests, manage screen streams, and scale up or down depending on demand. The two companies once rival in e-commerce became partners in infrastructure. Sometimes your features competitor is your best collaborator. By 2009, Netflix had fully migrated its video encoding and storage to AWS. When you press play, your movie didn't come from a Netflix warehouse. It streamed from Amazon Cloud. That same year, Netflix flipped the switch. They launched Watch Now, a feature allowing subscribers to stream movies through their web browsers. The library was small, just a thousand titles. The quality was modest, standard definition, and it only worked on Windows PC. But it was a spark that would ignite an entire industry. Revolutions rarely begin with perfection, they begin with possibilities. Streaming wasn't just an innovation, it was survival. DVD shipping costs were eating into margins, postage was rising every year. Handling millions of physical disks meant warehouse labor and loss. Streaming flipped that equation. No envelopes, no scratches, no inventory. Once a movie was uploaded, it could be watched an infinite number of times. It was scalability, a word that defined the 21st century. When you stop shipping products and start shipping data, the ceiling disappears. Netflix didn't just store data in the cloud, it learned to move it efficiently. They built their own content delivery network called Open Connect, deploying Netflix servers inside major internet service providers around the world. When you hit play, the stream doesn't travel from Seattle to Virginia. It often comes from a nearby city, maybe your neighborhood. That's why your streaming rarely buffers. It's local, cached, optimized. The internet may feel infinite, but speed is all about proximity. By partnering with AWS for cloud infrastructure and building Open Connect for distribution, Netflix created one of the most reliable streaming services in the world. Once streaming worked, the question was what to stream. Licensing deals with Hollywood was expensive. Netflix realized they couldn't rely on other studios forever. So they started producing their own shows, the first big one being House of Cards in 2013. It wasn't just about content, it was about control. Owning the content meant Netflix owned the data, the audience, and the brand. It transformed from a distribution into a studio and later into a global entertainment powerhouse. Streaming wasn't the destination, it was the doorway. When Netflix made the transition, investors were nervous. DVD rentals brought steady profits. Streaming was uncertain. But Hastings had data, and data told the story. A single streaming customer cost less than half as much to serve as a DVD by mail subscriber. Every hour streamed was an hour saved on postage, packaging, and returns. By 2012, the numbers were clear. Streaming brought in higher margins and global scalability. The DVD model couldn't follow the company into the future. Every breakthrough is also a breakup, saying goodbye to what once worked. By the early 2010s, streaming has surpassed physical rentals. By 2023, Netflix mailed its final DVD, closing the chapter that started it all. The red envelopes gave away to the red pixels, the Netflix end lighting up the screens around the world. They stopped delivering discs and started delivering experiences. Netflix's decision to move from DVD to streaming wasn't just about convenience. It was about anticipating behavior. They saw people didn't want movies in the mail. They wanted stories on demand. Anytime, anywhere, any device. That vision redefined how we consume media, how networks deliver it, and how technology serves creativity. And it wouldn't have been possible without one key partnership, Amazon Web Services, whose cloud turned Netflix stream into a living streaming reality. The future isn't a new product, it's a new perspective. So, to close it out, and by the way, I'm going to do a history of more of a deep dive into the history of all these services, Amazon Web Services, Netflix, all that, you know, in uh in future Sunday episodes. So don't you worry. I only did a snippet of Netflix, of, you know, we didn't even get in touch about their potential merger with Blockbuster back in the day, but we will get into it uh at some point. All right, from JCR Licklighter's Dream in 1962 to Amazon S3 in 2006, to the invisible networks that back up your phone. At night, the cloud has fulfilled a promise. Computing as a utility, accessible to all. Initial price was staggering,$20 for 50 megs. Today, billions enjoy gigabytes for free. What began as a way to store files became the backbone of communication, business, and creativity. But the real story of the cloud isn't in the servers, it's in us, the people who trust, upload, share, and create within it. We built the cloud to hold our data, and in return, it holds our digital lives. So next time you drag a file to the cloud, take a moment to appreciate the invisible infrastructure carrying your world. From the garage innovators to the global giants who turn a dream into the digital sky. I'm Professor Jrod and this has been Technology Tap. So next time, stay grounded, stay curious, and keep tapping into technology. This has been a presentation of Little Toucha Productions art by Sabra, used by Joe Kim. We're now part of the Pod Mac Network. You can follow me at TikTok at Professor J Rod at J R O D, or you can email me at professorjrod at J R O D at Gmail.com.