You aren&#x27;t timesharing your tiny mainframe, so it is quite different, yes. The cloud is <i>precisely</i> what your mom had on a mainframe 50 years ago, including virtualization, on-the-fly scaling of resources (maybe a little more difficult because of the larger equipment), and even renting time on computers you didn&#x27;t have in your offices, since not every institution could afford their own computer.