Rain City Story

The Hardware That Ran Google in 1999

* 2-proc Pentium II 300 MHz, 512 MB, five 9 GB drives
* 2-proc Pentium II 300 MHz, 512 MB, four 9 GB drives
* 4-proc PPC 604 333 MHz, 512 MB, eight 9 GB drives
* 2-proc UltraSparc II 200 MHz, 256 MB, three 9 GB drives, six 4 GB drives
* Disk expansion, eight 9 GB drives
* Disk expansion, ten 9 GB drives

So we're talkin':

* 1,792 MB of memory
* 366 GB of disk storage
* 2,933 MHz in 10 CPUs

Which is less than half the processing power of my Linux desktop at home. Pretty awesome though that such little hardware could power a site like Google, even before it became wildly popular. My first time using Google would have been in late 1999 while working at Bank One. I had befriended some IT guys and it was one of the only search engines that wasn't blocked by the corporate firewall. Who wouldda thought...

(via Coding Horror and Reddit)