Normally the data center admins and network professionals take the hardware virtualization as a new addition and buzz word in the industry . So it will be curious to know that the concept of virtualization dates back to the early days of the computing industry .
As I type this word in my blog the term virtualization is shown as a spelling mistake by my editor . It is quite curious that a word coined back in 1960 did not still become part of the spell check systems .
Yes you read it right, . the very basic concept of virtualization started back in the experimental IBM M44/44X system and the full fledged concept of virtualization as we see now is completed back in 1966 with IBM CP-40 and CP -67 and the Virtual Machine Conversational Monitor System ( VM / CMS ) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems.
At that time when computers was so expensive and owned only by nations , virtualization was a nice concept to save hardware cost . But as the business of personal computing progessed IBM dropped the plans for the virtualization as they were primarily a mchine seller and the basic concept of virtualization was against selling more systems .
this Wikipedia link will come handy if you need more data on it
So just keep in mind that by learning virtualization you are not learning about a new technology that popped up 5 or 6 years back . Hope it helps . 🙂