This is the last post in the Nothing New Under the Sun arc started in Nothing New Under the Sun (Buying Computer Time, part 1)..., continued through Nothing New Under the Sun (Buying Computer Time, part 3)... and prompted by an article, Amazon puts network power online, in Nature that talks about Amazon.com making its computing resources available for a fee. The Dartmouth TTY in my highschool, my forays into extended computing at Lincoln Labs, and my hanging out with CompSci students at Northeastern when John was travelling on business and asked them to babysit me for a weekend were all being done on computers that leased time to various groups in order to amortize their own maintenance costs. The massive computers I was programming and playing on at TX2 were not having their full computational capabilities exercised at any point in time, nor were Dartmouth's nor were Northeastern's nor any other research facility I visited in my teens. Letting me play on them didn't increase their load one bit. Each of these machines leased time to groups, researchers, corporations, in order to answer questions which these separate entities couldn't solve in a timely fashion themselves.
I'm glad Amazon and others are making their computer farms available for those in need of such computational beneficence, and there's nothing new under the sun...
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