Racking up an honor
July 16, 2004
We're five years old and already they're sticking us in a museum. The Computer History Museum, to be precise, a neighbor of ours here in Mountain View that boasts the world's largest collection of artifacts from the still-young digital era. Yesterday a bunch of Googlers toured a small portion of the collection, gawking at a Victorian Era difference engine and a German Enigma code machine, chuckling over immense IBM and Cray warhorses, lusting for TRS80s and Apple IIs, and so on.
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Admittedly, we were also there for a parochial purpose: to celebrate the entry into the museum's permanent collection of the first Google corkboard server rack, a do-it-yourself contraption which was one of about 30 in our fledgling company's first data center back in prehistoric, mist-enshrouded 1999. A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no fewer than 86 hand-installed cooling fans. Guess the economy wasn't the only thing overheated in 1999.
-- Michael Krantz
Google Blog team
Admittedly, we were also there for a parochial purpose: to celebrate the entry into the museum's permanent collection of the first Google corkboard server rack, a do-it-yourself contraption which was one of about 30 in our fledgling company's first data center back in prehistoric, mist-enshrouded 1999. A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no fewer than 86 hand-installed cooling fans. Guess the economy wasn't the only thing overheated in 1999.
-- Michael Krantz
Google Blog team