Google’s first server was made of Lego

In a Stanford basement lab in 1996 the world’s first search engine was born. But did you know it was built in a Lego enclosure?

Google's First Lego Server

The text reads:

The Original Google Storage

In 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students in Stanford CSD, working on the Digital Library Project, needed a large amount of diskspace to test their Pagerank algorithm on actual world-wide-web data. At that time 4 GB disks were the largest available, so they assembled 10 of these drives into a low-cost cabinet.

In Nov 1999, Google Inc., by then operating one of the primary search engines on the web, provided replacement storage capacity to the Digital Library project so that we could move this original storage assembly into our history displays.

As of September 2000, Google, now located in Mountain View, operated 5000 PCs for searching and web crawling, using the Linux operating system.

 

More info and pictures can be found here.

6 thoughts on “Google’s first server was made of Lego

  1. Ulrik

    Did we know it was built in a Lego enclosure? No, because they are not actual LEGO bricks, but some clone product.

    Reply
  2. AP

    Looks like Duplo (based on my early childhood memories)… which apparently is also a Lego product – who knew!?

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      duplo was always a lego product but it wasn’t that big at the time, it was meant for kids and was a different part off the lego company

      Reply
  3. Denny

    Since when was Google the first search engine, and founded in 1996? I remember AltaVista prior to 1996…

    Reply
    1. deac

      Don’t be too concerned. The internet is full of misinformation. Specifically, I’ve been trying to find actual specifications of this creation for the past 3 hours and essentially every website is busy stupefied by the fact that the enclosure was made of LEGO pieces that no actual valuable information is actually available. Seriously, people–stop flooding the internet with the same noise. Your enclosure could be made of cardboard. In fact, people make enclosures out of cardboard–go write about it.

      Reply

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