Isn't cloud, a return to the mainframe days in a sense? All you had was a terminal. Applications and data resided in the computer center.
The difference now is that the terminals were dumb and PC's are not. Before the dumb terminals were networked with the hub, the mainframe. Now pcs are networked in a far more complex network with no defined central hub, but still have to deal with issues of queuing, prioritizing tasks, time sharing, batch processing etc.