I recall first hearing the term “Cloud” in the context of Tymnet sales.
It was to suggest that the geographic location of the data was no longer a limitation.
This was in contrast to earlier situations where IBM assumed that a person sitting before a computer terminal was employed by whoever operated the computer to which the terminal was connected.
Of course a given terminal, like any IO device, was connected to just one computer, at least for months at a time.
The <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270>IBM 3270</a> was introduced in 1970.
Its configuration options presumed that most terminals were in the same building as the computer to which they were attached.
There was a somewhat expensive option to buy a remote controller for a batch of terminals in another city but in addition to paying for that remote controller you had to lease a voice grade circuit from the phone company at $2 per mile per month.
<p>The cloud broached the idea that a terminal could connect to different computers at different times and thereby connect to various data bases.
A person at the terminal might access data from a variety of organizations.
This was possible earlier by the idea of connecting a terminal to a computer thru the phone company.
This provided a logical crossbar but at considerable expense of toll calls.
Tymnet, and later Internet would supplant the long distance telephone calls and the specialized controllers.
<p>Tymnet sales sold a service to institutions who wanted their data service to be widely available to whoever had one of the new inexpensive ASCII terminals.
Tynmet would install a Tymnet node next to their computer that could already talk over the phone with toll charges, and suddenly people all over the United States, and a few international cities, would be a local phone call from their data.
<p>The <a href=https://www.nlm.nih.gov/archive/20130423/bsd/historypresentation.html>National Library of Medicine</a> was an early adopter of this paradigm.
Their charter was to make their computerized data easily accessible to hospitals and more generally the medical profession.