Google's Early Hardware

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?"

Comments

Where are these hardwares today?

[antdude]

Are they in a museum or Google's vault? ;)

Re:Where are these hardwares today?

[joelil]

The Hardwares are Being recycled. All the equipment that is in those pictures is either in our wearhouse or has been recycled. HMMMMMMM. Maybe I could build one of those too. I have all the equipment. Recycling

standard

[Cheeze]

I think those types of setups are familiar to just about anyone that was in the computer arena in the early to mid-nineties. Having random machine without cases, 10 keyboards that may or may not be plugged in, and horrible wiring is probably how many of the top technological companies started. I am sure now it's all properly racked up with labeled cables and a KVM switch, but before the funding, I bet most companies run on old workstations. I thought the lego disk array was appropriate. I wonder what a fire marshal would have to say about their setup.

I think the worst setup I have seen was a previous company I worked for. They had a satellite office that just contained hardware. Well, no one ever went there, and for good reason. It housed quite a bit of old dialup gear, analog dialup gear, complete with external serial 28.8 modems. they were just stacked up all over the place. good thing they thought ahead and got modems with volume knobs, or you would be able to hear each person dialing in. The plastic racks all of the gear was sitting on was so old, it had started cracking and was a hazard to be around. It all worked somehow though. ahh...the good old days.

Slashdot.... back in 1997

[billygr]

How about the /. ? http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/

Re:Slashdot.... back in 1997

[Bake]

The sad part is that this particular copy of the slashdot front page links to an article where the W3C recommends HTML 4.0. And now 7 years later, slashdot is STILL using the much-outdated HTML 3.2.

Re:It give us hope

[Achoi77]

A lot of those boxes seemed to be donated by IBM. Hrm, I wonder what they did to get so many 'donations,' and where can I get some of these so called 'donated boxes by IBM.' =)

Seriously, did they go up to IBM and pitch their vision or something?

In the Early Days

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find tons of info and reading by googling 'site:stanford.edu backrub' should yeild some of the first papers and some great pictures.

storage, then and now

[dankelley]

Less than a decade later, this sort of storage sits in an ipod. A decade before, we stored 'big' datasets on 20Meg disks.

It's amazing, how hardware changes.

But human-scale things remain the same. It still takes the same time to write a /. comment, or to sigh.

How many servers now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard Google has a serverfarm of 8000 machines but how many do they have today?

Just to lighten up a little, check out a little story by Verity Stob on Life in the Google Farm.

Re:It give us hope

[dattaway]

In the electronics industry, its called "engineering samples." Have an idea? Call their sales department and ask for samples to prototype your idea. Much like a test drive of a new car, except you get to keep the car and they come over to help you modify the hell out of it.

video of a lecture about google

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have broadband and a spare hour, have a look at this lecture about google by Urs Holzle. Its reasonably light on hard-core specifics, but he covers some interesting things like determining the relevance of a page, hosting problems due to very high power density, failure rates of hardware etc etc.

Interesting stuff.

Re:Not bad!

[pholower]

everything they used then could still run nicely today for a lower volume site.

How many site online now do you know of that have as much volume as Google? Wouldn't just about every site out there be a lower volume site?

I agree though. I wouldn't mind having that setup for my own site. It would probably run faster than the crap I have it on now.

Re:Orignal "About Google" Page

[1Oman]

From that page:
Current Development: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Craig Silverstein

I wonder what happend to this Craig Silverstein fellow.
Sergey And Larry were like "we're gonna start a serach engine company" and he was like "theres no money in that, I'm going into banner ads".

let's get some info on the current setup

[iwein]

getting some info of google's current hardware in here seems a good idea. here goes.

here is a nice article. The company estimates that a server running Google applications all day is the equivalent of 40 years of use in a regular context. Approximately 82 of these servers die every day, but not completely; Google employs maintenance people who walk around with carts of hard disks, for example, and replace them in malfunctioning servers or UPSes.

now for some pics... damn. can't find them with google :). i'll post them if i have them.

I am an idiot!

[John Harrison]

There was a database class offered at Stanford that was advertised as being about "things you could do with our db of 1/3rd of the internet's text, including links."

This sounded interesting, but I hated the prof so I didn't take it. This class turned out to be related to the Google project of course and many of the people who took it ended up at the company.

My other brush with Google greatness was being designated driver for Larry (friend of a friend). This was before anyone knew about Google.

You know you're a computer nut when...

[spamnix]

You know you're a computer nut when: 1) your bedroom has more computers in it than Google's early setup, and is much less organized. I have 15 in here now. 12x10' room. I pity the power wiring in here. One Pentium II is running in a case built entirely of STANDARD lego (not duplo). Deja vu all over again. Incedentally, I use DistCC, and can muster the CPU power equivalent to an 8GHz P4...

Impressive...

[mrscott]

At my previous job, I was responsible for the web services for a financial services company. We hosted our stuff at a data center in Herndon, VA. Some of Google's hardware happened to be in a wire cage that I walked by every day and it was pretty damn impressive. 42U racks, with either 42 or 84 (back to back, 42U high) servers in each one and about 6-8 racks per cage. I will admit that my "technical ego" was bruised a little since I wanted it for myself... :-)

Re:PPC

[niks42]

Actually I do have a copy of Win NT version 3.51 and the ARC boot diskette for PPC (but only boots on PREP machines, and the F50 above is not a PREP machine ;-) ) .. It does boot, it kind of works OK and its fine as an OS goes , but things that run in that environment are scarce. I think IBM dropped NT in a deal with Microsoft when M$ dropped NT support for MIPS.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Looks like the early days to me...

[speby]

Nice Speedos
And people want to buy this guy's stock?
And you can get the whole shebang here: Sergey Brin's Stanford Homepage

Lego = Construct verb in Latin

[Anonymous Coward]

http://latin.realdictionary.com/Latin/lego.asp

lego - appoint, select.

lego - to gather, choose, collect, pass through,
read.

The word LEGO(R) is formed from the Danish word Leg Godt (play well). It was discovered later that the word in Latin means "I study, I put together".

Re:Hey

[Beowulf_Boy]

Pffff...
in my 10x10 dorm room, I have the following
1 20" monitor
2 17" monitors
3 computer towers
3 laptops
1 12 port Bay Networks Switch
1 48 port 10mb hub
1 10 port 10mb hub
1 4 port wireless 802.11B switch
2 phones
2.1 Klipsch Speakers
2 Jensen Speakers
1 32" TV
1 old ass half working VCR
1 giant rubbermaid thing full of spair parts

And the campus network people looked at me funny when I asked for a second mac address identity when I brought down my second computer. They got scared when I brought the third, and after that I just stuck everything behind a router so they wouldn't bitch.

It gets 90* or so in here if I don't open the window or run the AC full blast.