– "Within the next decade electronic data centers are expected to sell computational power to the general public in a way somewhat analogous to today's distribution of electricity," | M.R. Irwin: "The computer utility", Datamation Vo112 No 11 pp 22-27 1966

– The computer utility is an emerging form of organization providing computer services to all types of users ... ... These developments suggest advantages for several users in sharing the power of a single large computer, with the computing power brought separately to each user's location, in the spirit of the folk saying, "why buy a cow when milk's so cheap?"" | R. D. Jones: "The public planning information system and the computer utility", Proceedings A.C.M. National Meetings, 1967

– ... simultaneously making available to a multitude of diverse geographically distributed users a wide range of different information-processing services and capabilities on an on-line (immediate) basis. As in any utility, the overhead would be shared among all users, with each user's charges varying with the actual time and facilities used in the solution of his problems. Ideally, such a utility would provide each user, whenever he needed it, with a private computer capability as powerful as the current technology permitted but at a small fraction of the cost of an individually owned system | D. F. Parkhill: The Challenge of the Computer Utility, 1966

forecasts are:

that 75 per cent of all computers will have a time- sharing capability by 1970 (General Electric); that by 1975 almost all computer usage will be "on-line" (Informatics [a company at the time]); and that within five years some 60 per cent of all computers will be tied into the nation's communication network (Western Union). | M.R. Irwin, 1966

lots of still bending questions have been discussed under the terms "computer utility" and "public planning informations systems" in the 1960s: data banks, privacy, regulations, business of data acquisition, ... you name it.

... These initial systems were far from optimal but can be well justified in the spirit of Chesterton's dictum that a thing worth doing at all is worth doing badly. | R. D. Jones