ASPs: A Brief History

The term ASP is a renaming of an old practice sometimes called “outsourcing.” Businesses in the 1960s through the 1980s sold time-shares on mainframe computers and hosted subscribers' applications. Model 3270 terminals functioned as thin clients. Mainframe tools and networking protocols provided control over, and insight into usage, reliability, availability, performance, and service levels.

These time-shares or outsourcing companies even owned or leased the communications network. Mutual trust between provider and customer was possible because the provider controlled the quality of deliverables and the customer could validate that quality.

With the advent of client/server computing, the technical industry's progress toward ...

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