We usually use the term online storage to describe placing electronic files in the virtual hands of a third party, usually on a file server, but this has not always been the case. Indeed, this widespread use of cloud storage is quite recent, only about 20 years old.

The combination of the words “cloud” and “storage” goes back much further in time. The first mention of Cloud Storage is in an 1896 book with a title that appears to come directly from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Mystery of the White Serpent: A Legend of Thunder Peak Tower. 1896 was the year the modern Olympic Games were revived in Athens; it is This old.

The 34-page pamphlet, translated from Chinese by Samuel L. Woodbridge, lists Cloud Storage on page 16. “Go to the Cloud Storage room, take out a branch from the tree of life, and give it to the white serpent.”

Cloud storage, 19th century style

So what does this refer to? Well, it’s literally a place where physical clouds are stored.

Indeed, all recorded digitized content that mentions cloud storage in the 20th century refers to traditional clouds (cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus, etc.). It is not surprising that meteorologists and meteorologists have used the term widely (for example in Monthly weather reviewa periodical of the American Meteorological Society).

IDG computer world was almost the first to mention the term in an article about the future of storage.

In Storage 2001: Chaos Command (August 17, 1998), the author, Kevin Burden, clearly alludes to cloud storage, as a concept, without explicitly naming it. “Vendors say to think of the SAN (Storage Area Network) as a cloud” before adding “the analogy of the cloud may be appropriate because at the moment the SAN is not much more than a concept”.

A concept that stuck around for far too long and it took another eight years for Amazon to launch the first true public cloud storage, S3 (Simple Storage Service)And the rest is history.