1960-69: The idea of cloud computing started to emerge before the Internet was invented.

1961: United States computer guru John McCarthy (inventor of the term artificial intelligence, or AI) first suggested a vague model of a computer time-sharing system, which was the early stage of cloud computing.

1983: US computer company Sun Microsystems Inc floated the idea of "the network is the computer". However, Sun was able to roll out only one product based on cloud-computing technology in 2009, before Oracle Corp acquired it.

1997: IT professor Ramnath Chellappa was the first to use "cloud computing" to describe the new computing system that relies on cooperation of computers. He suggested that the cloud would be a new "computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone."

2006: Web search company Google Inc, for the first time, shared its idea of cloud computing. In the same year, Amazon.com Inc launched one of the world's earliest online storage services named Amazon Simple Storage Service. Amazon's investment in the area has paved way for the company to become one of the biggest cloud-computing service providers globally.

2008: Chinese companies started to learn how the new technology could benefit their businesses.

2010: Cloud-computing services started being used widely in the consumer market.

October 2011: Apple Inc launched iCloud, a cloud-based storage service for Apple product owners. The company claimed iCloud has more than 150 million users as of July 2012.

In 2011: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced plans to develop a cloud-based operating system for smartphones. The move was seen as Alibaba's attempt to tap into China's huge smartphone market.

Since 2011: The Chinese government has reiterated its support for the development of the cloud computing industry in China.

(China Daily 01/21/2013 page13)