I vaguely remember reading somewhere that GE, at the time, saw computing like electrical power or tap water and wanted to deliver mainframe time sharing to people's terminal through high speed connections. They even asked the bell lab guys to write multics for that (which Thompson and Ritchie parodied with Unix).
They basically imagined the "cloud" 50 years too early.
We went from mainframes and terminals that accessed them to personal computers back to terminals of all sorts of shapes and sizes accessing everything on modern mainframes again.
They basically imagined the "cloud" 50 years too early.