Here’s an interesting video from WWDC 1997 brought to our attention by our friend Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger: at the conference’s keynote, as you can see from the video around the 13 minute mark, Steve Jobs starts talking about the “connected” world he lives in where, thanks to networking hardware at NeXT, Apple and Pixar, he’s able to take all his files and folders, his entire “home directory” wherever he goes thanks to what we call the “cloud” nowadays. By storing his personal data in the cloud, on the server, Steve says he doesn’t have to care about data loss and backups anymore – he can simply change computers and, thanks to the speed and RAM capacity of the servers,  have the Home folder quickly coming down from the server in seconds. He says this was already happening in 1990 at NeXT.

Let me describe the world I live in. About eight years ago 1 we had high-speed networking connected to our NeXT hardware. Because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data — our “home directory” we called them — off of our local machines and put them on a server. The software made that completely transparent…a professional could be hired to back up that server every night.

In the last seven years, do you know how many times I lost any personal data? Zero. Do you how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero.

I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.

Fast forward 14 years, Apple will officially introduce iCloud, its upcoming cloud services offering, at the WWDC 2011 keynote on Monday, June 6. Surprisingly enough, what Steve Jobs discussed in 1997 is still very relevant today: the vision of taking our data – all kinds of data – anywhere we go and access it at any time no matter the machine is what many users are expecting from iCloud when combined with iOS 5 and Lion, myself included. And it seems like Apple is taking the necessary steps to allow users to do what Jobs described: by replacing the local login system with a new Apple ID-based remote login feature, Lion could enable users to easily switch computers and make their desktop data really portable and living in the cloud. Or, as many suggest, a new remote screen-sharing functionality powered by an Apple account and iCloud might be an option to remotely log into any machine from any device, perhaps even iPad. Of course, everything would be based on iCloud – the “server” that Jobs was talking about in 1997.

You can read more about our WWDC 2011 hopes here. Check out the lengthy video below, and sign up for our June 6 liveblog here.