Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
1GB per person. Servers made of Lego. No April Fools.
Its amazing to think that search engine used to run on just that.
Id be interested to see what their current hardware is like.
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 ?
With a hard drive case made of LEGOs and under a dozen computers google managed to become the world's most powerful search tool.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Last time I checked, those same model drives were listing for $5 on E-bay but not selling... it'd cost way more to ship them.
Are they in a museum or Google's vault? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's duplo you insensitive clod!
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.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Oh. I thought you were going to talk about this.
I'm no psychologist but I'm pretty sure the simplicity of Google's site design could be an attempt to balance the chaos of their hardware and wiring setup
How does it look today?
how do they manage the wirering to all those servers today?
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
I love Google and want to have like a million of its babies. I want to print out Google's front page and rub it against my naked body. Actually, I've done it once already, got some nasty paper cuts. But it was worth it.
I LOVE GOOGLE
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.
Here.
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.
Fowl hardware: pidgeons
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
For those who are wondering, I happen to own two of the very same machines in the top two pictures lol! They are Dell Poweredge 4200 machines with the logo plates removed! The specs are roughly this:
Dual CPU capable (max 333mhz)
Max RAM 512MB Bios Limit (66mhz EDO SDRAM)
6x80pin SCA drive bays
Dual 700 watt hot swap power supplies
Built in VGA (ATI Mach64 VT 1MB)
For the record, they typically ship with AMI Megaraid 428 (or higher) hardware raid cards. But the onboard SCSI2 is Adaptec AIC-7860 & 7880. Also worth mentioning, they are clusterable using Windows NT. I grabbed these machines off machine and local computer store and have been very stable work horses running Debian! (www.emaildesktop.com).
Just glad to see that these machines were useful in their days!
In case you're having a hard time loading the images from the story, you can find some other images here.
Just to lighten up a little, check out a little story by Verity Stob on Life in the Google Farm.
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.
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.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of.. nah..
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
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 googleShow a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
if only the Glastonbury ticket service was on such a powerful set up.
Dual Pentium IIs?
Luxury.
The fact that Google started as a research project at Stanford probably didn't hurt.
Anyone else see this picture of Sergey in a speed-o? Here is another one of him IN DRAG. I kid you not!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Those are not legos! I remember those things from way back when, they're Duplos. They're way bigger than Legos, and they don't cut your foot when you step on them. They're designed so that little kids can't hurt themselves. I never thought I'd see those again.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
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.
Lasers Controlled Games!
How is that sad? You can read this page can't you? It works doesn't it? No need to update. Simply no need.
/. don't come up with some god-awful CSS nerd-style site!
Please
Thanks.
Read on slashdot about what really happened to Craig Silverstein.
Unless those are the worlds smallest servers, I think those look like Duplo blocks, not Legos. I have boxes of both. Duplos are simpler, and about twice the size - although Duplos and Legos can be mixed. The thick Duplo baseplates make a much better case cover, as they would be stiffer than Legos. I especially like the operators' faces as a part of the case.
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...
I have a BS in BS.
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... :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...when the answer was FLOOR MOUNTED servers the whole time! Next thing you know, we'll find out you can skip the expensive UPS and plug things straight into the wall...nah, that's crazy!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Nice Speedos
And people want to buy this guy's stock?
And you can get the whole shebang here: Sergey Brin's Stanford Homepage
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
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.
I just wonder about the last time a girl was in that room...
Nahhhhh..
More pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from Stanford CS Department's Computer History Exhibits Photo Tour.
You can physically see this display in the basement of the Stanford Gates Building.
You are tough, you mine data,
You surf first and think later,
And your crawler fast as light
Wanders madly in the night.
Surf first, think later, huh? Not sure I can agree with that... ;-)
Lego can both be used as a mass noun, or to refer to the individual bricks. I like the sound of Lego as a mass noun, because I like mass nouns in general, but the usage as Lego as Lego Brick is a generally accepted part of Engilsh.
But yes, there is no need for the 's'. And I really think that when you spell it LEGO you must be refering to the mass noun version, because LEGO is only spelt that way when bowing to the wishes of the trademark holder, and the trademark holder also wishes that people use it exclusively as a mass noun. So if you are going to say LEGOs, you should spell it legos.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor