There’s no such thing as the father of cloud computing but one guy who came pretty close was John McCarthy, whose death, on Sunday, has just been reported.

The news was announced by Stanford University where McCarthy, who was 84, had been a long-term member of the computer science faculty. He was best known for his work on artificial intelligence (he is credited with having coined the term) and was the inventor of the LISP language

Before his work on AI, however, he was also the first person to speculate that computing could be delivered as a utility like gas and electricity. It was a theme taken up by Douglas Parkhill in his 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility but McCarthy deserves the credit for his vision.

McCarthy also pioneered time-sharing computing, a technology that was picked up BBN, a leading light in the early stages of the Internet.