The First-Ever Cloud Service Gave You Less Storage Than Most Floppy Disks

Cloud services very much seem like a modern invention. The option to store your photos, documents, and even access and play games remotely stored on a cloud server, it all sprung to life and was made possible by high-speed internet connections. But if you actually delve into the true history of the cloud, its early foundation stretches back to the 1960's. Meanwhile, the first networking systems came online in the '80s, in 1991 the World Wide Web was born, and a little later, in 1996, the term "cloud computing" was initially proposed.

Cloud storage, specifically, the act of storing data on remote hardware, is actually just as old. The first ever cloud solution, called the "Internet Drive," came from CompuServe back in 1983. Because dial-up was the main internet gateway — and was relatively slow — the storage capacity for users was limited. They could hold a measly 128 kilobytes, less than 1 megabyte. The service was mainly for businesses rather than the average consumer to facilitate and deliver secure off-site storage for sensitive data.

It's difficult to imagine storage capacities that small, especially when, today, you can get up to 200 gigabytes of space through Google One for a mere $3 per month. There are even a handful of free cloud storage providers that offer upwards of 2 GB of space. To better put the capacity differences into perspective, a floppy disk could hold up to 1.2 megabytes. That's over 9 times more space than 128 kb. A 1 terabyte drive has over 7 million times the space. Although the Internet Drive's capacity seems infinitesimal, it was extremely useful to companies back then, and it laid the groundwork for the technologies we have today.

Following CompuServe, AT&T launched a service called PersonalLink in 1994 that introduced cloud storage support for several mobile or handheld models. The key feature was that it was available on-the-go, to smaller devices, for busy professionals. The particular models that used the service included the Sony Magic Link and the Motorola Envoy – some of the earliest versions of the modern tablet. At the time they were referred to as "PDAs" or Personal Digital Assistants.

Unfortunately, AT&T's PersonalLink service never garnered the customer base it needed with fewer than 10,000 subscribers total throughout its lifetime. AT&T shuttered the service not long after, citing a lack of interest. Regardless, these were some of the earliest forms of cloud computing and cloud storage made available. They have direct ties to eventual upgrades through services like Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute and Simple Storage Service, which would launch much, much later in the mid-2000's.

It's still a far cry from the cloud computing and storage solutions we have now. Despite that growth, and the many technological innovations, no cloud storage is ever truly "unlimited" and may never be. That's because cloud storage technology doesn't actually work the way most people think it does. There are still servers somewhere, computers really, with physical hard drives, and those are used to store the data. What makes it convenient is they're remotely located, and users connect to their data over the internet through software and network services. The hardware itself is another reason why earlier versions of cloud storage services had such nominal capacities. Hard drives then were much larger physically but less capable and with limited capacities.