"I never drew a cloud: I preferred to the draw the earth/ground symbol"

I recently really enjoyed a lovely piece by Tom Taylor, The Full Spectrum White Noise of the Network on his journal of sorts, Scraplab, and this passage stood out:

The phrase "cloud computing" almost certainly originates from the symbols drawn by engineers on networking diagrams. When representing the rest of the internet - the amorphous blob of computing just beyond the horizon - scribble a cloud and be done with it.

I never drew a cloud: I preferred to the draw the earth/ground symbol. You don't connect to the cloud, you ground off to the internet. It seems like a better metaphor: computing flows through physical pipes, popping up in data centres and road-side boxes and telegraph poles. The cloud is a lie.

And I never understood the "ether" in Ethernet. By taking the radiation and constraining it in a waveguide (cable), we've taken it out of the ether. It's the wireless technologies that should be called Ethernet.

That turn of phrase there - you ground off to the internet - is wonderful.