http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_service_provider
But around 2000 it was proposed to do what the Google G drive says it's going to do. You were supposed to move all of your computer applications to the ASP servers. Your computer would become a dummy terminal. But of course they never answered the question of what one is supposed to do if the server is down, which happened more frequently then than now.
ASP, cloud, thin client. They keep trying to go back to the dumb terminal, and forgetting why it went away in the first place.