Interactive Marketing Blog

This is a story which I had to write about – not that I was first or will be the last one to write about but for this one, Royal Pingdom wrote about what Google was and from where it started.

To be precise, my liking for Google started when I finished John Battelle’s “The Search” couple of years back where he gave a hawk-eye’s view of Googledom and how it started amidst all other major players like Yahoo etc.

The Picture below is the Stanford University from where two more than that, brilliant brains wrote or I should say rewrote the history of Google that it is now.

Closeups and hardware descriptions available here. Note the homemade Lego disk box…

The original Google platform

The original Google platform (Backrub) at Stanford University was written in Java and Python and ran on the following hardware (shown in the pic above):

• Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
• 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers (donated by Intel) with 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. The main search ran on these.
• F50 IBM RS/6000 (donated by IBM) with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
• Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
• IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives (donated by IBM).
• Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.

Crude it is! Isn’t it? But if we go back in those times, then the future of Search or I should say, the Webdom is just getting built!

And here is what must be one of the very first tries at a Google logo, from back in 1997, a year before the actual Google website went live:

Truly, history in the making!

Credits: Royal Pingdom