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Google's Early Hardware

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the back-in-the-day dept.

revjonnylove writes "Ever wonder what Google's early hardware looked like? Well, wonder no more. Thanks to Archive.org's Way Back Machine, we can all bask in the glory of Google's home made HDD cases, constructed partially of Lego, as well as other neat-o toys. Is that a PowerPC logo I see on one of their servers?"

6 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Not bad! by CptChipJew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are 9 9Gdrives between the two machines...The left box has 3 9G drives, and there are 6 4G drives on the right...This IBMdisk expansion box has another 8 9G drives...This is our homemade disk box which contains 10 9G SCSI drives

    294 GB? That's a pretty damn nice mostly donated setup for 1997. This was '97 right?

    --
    Vonal Declosion
  2. Its amazing... by sailor420 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its amazing to think that search engine used to run on just that.

    Id be interested to see what their current hardware is like.

  3. It give us hope by thammoud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    us pee ons that we can still create something very special with almost nothing but scrapped together hardware. Who said that we need millions to implement great ideas ?

    1. Re:It give us hope by black+mariah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They were at college. They probably called up the guy at IBM that handles giving shit out and said "Hey, IBM Giving Shit Out Dude, give some shit to us." Or something to that effect. If you're doing some kind of research I'm sure IBM and most other companies would be willing to cut you a deal or donate hardware to your project.

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
  4. Amazing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With a hard drive case made of LEGOs and under a dozen computers google managed to become the world's most powerful search tool.

  5. Re:Slashdot.... back in 1997 by Bake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As others have pointed out before me, there is quite a lot of bandwidth to be saved for Slashdot to switch over to a CSS based web. The content will be MORE ACCESSIBLE TO OTHER DEVICES. It'll actually have a better chance of getting validated as anything. Right now it doesn't even rank good enough to validate as HTML 3.2*.

    Why do you consider CSS "god-awful" as you put it? Is it because you can't grok it, or are you the type that would prefer a compiler that assumes when statements end and puts in its own end-of-statement marker instead of doing the right thing and bitch about it in the compiler output?

    *It would appear that the powers that be here on Slashdot aren't too happy with people trying to validate the site as the W3c validator received a HTTP 403, Denied from slashdot.org