Appliances turned into “tools of psychological maintenance and symbols of transformation.”

The meeting in Michigan laid the groundwork for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored computer network that would eventually expand into the modern Internet and, finally, into the utility-computing grid.

Virtualization breaks the lock between software and hardware that made client–server computing so inefficient and complicated.

most of the many trillions of dollars that companies have invested into information technology have gone to waste.

Now that data can stream through the Internet at the speed of light, the full power of computers can finally be delivered to users from afar.

The arrival of the microcomputer would quickly upend the industry, ushering in a new era in business computing.

1990. An idealistic young software programmer named Tim Berners-Lee, working in an office at CERN, the big European physics laboratory straddling the border between Switzerland and France, is writing the codes that will deliver the Internet to the people.

It is providing, he wrote, echoing John Perry Barlow, “a new mind for an old species.” In the end, “we will live inside this thing.”

it’s built on a technology known as virtualization—a technology that will be crucial to the future development of utility computing. Indeed, without virtualization, large-scale utility computing is unthinkable.