Google Hardware in 1998

I remember in 1997 when someone first pointed me to http://google.stanford.edu a student project that was supposed to beat out WebCrawler as a search engine. I wasn’t too impressed at the time… It’s interesting to think how huge Google has become and how I don’t really use anything else to search the web. Let alone the dozens of other services I use Google for regularly.    At the time the Google.standford.edu homepage looked something like , complete with the default to only show 10 results.

What is even more impressive is the hardware that ran google back then:

• 2 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers with 512MB of RAM. There are 9 9G drives between the two machines. The main search engine ran on these.
• An IBM RS6000 with 4 processors and 512MB of memory. It had 8 9G drives internal.
• A Machine with  3 9G drives, and there are 6 4G drives attached to a Sun Ultra II.
• An IBM disk expansion box had another 8 9G drives.
• A Sun Ultra II with dual 200MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM.
• A homemade disk box which contains 10 9G SCSI drives.

All of Google in 1998 as a whole: