This article (membership required) is remarkable mostly for the fact that it was published in 1968. (Hat tip to Jonathan Smith.) It describes an experiment in creating an artificial economy to buy and sell computer time in the cloud, an idea that has been kicked around a number of times in the intervening decades but never quite took hold, until recently if you count literal pricing in dollars in EC2. The concept of buying time on your company’s compute cluster in a pseudo currency may come back into vogue as such installations become commonplace and over demanded.

Also check out the hand drawn figure and the advertisement at the end: