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No, I don't mean the big white fluffy things that scud across our skies dampening our adventures - I mean the ICT thing that you cant avoid reading about even in the tabloid press.  The other day I found myself telling someone (in fact, as usual, anyone who would listen!) what the 'original' idea was - and then realized that the current realization was about as 180 degrees opposed as you could get.  The original idea (way back, mid-late 90s?) was that every home would have a PC (Amstrad PCW with a whopping 128k of RAM etc) that was connected to the internet.  We would only use our super-fast 250kHz machines for a hour or so a day and the rest of the time it would be controlled by some central monster load-divider/scheduler that would distribute compute load and storage across all of these millions of PCs - making a huge super-computer out of them.  As you wouldn't know where your 'stuff' was being 'done' it was coined 'the cloud' but some people called it 'distributed computing' etc.  Just recently HP (I think it was) had the idea that all these machines could become 'data-furnaces' - using their waste heat to heat the homes.  but the 'cloud' as it is sold to us today is exactly the opposite:  Concentrated into huge dedicated fixed location data-centres that are highly energy efficient because they are heavily loaded and virtualized in the extreme - not nebulous at all, in fact knobbly not fluffy...