My girl believes the "cloud" is a physical structure in California. That's why the Bay Area is popular for software development.

Not even joking.

To be fair, the fog clouds coming over the hills in the Bay Area can be thick enough to look like physical structures.

Well, she's technically correct. The "cloud" is just a fancy word for someone else's computer. Be it in California or the middle of nowhere in Utah.

Hmm, I've always considered it to be a logical structure dissociated from physical machines. The prior systems were such that one stored data on a particular rack of computers but using a cloud removed that association from the customer. Yes, the data is ultimately in some computer's storage somewhere but the company can remove that computer from the internet and move the data, it's not a computer - there's an abstraction layer in place.

So, I'd say a server is "just a computer somewhere", The Cloud is necessarily more than that.

I recently talked to an older fellow who thought that it is called "the cloud" because it is located in satellites.