Old Computer Tech

On Adam's weblog [livejournal.com], I saw a link to an interesting post on Coding Horror [codinghorror.com]. It has pictures of one of Google's first custom built production servers.

I was very interested in seeing the pictures, because I'm a computer nerd. But also, I remembered reading lots of stories [baselinemag.com] about why Google would custom-build thousands of their own racks in the first place. Back in the day, data centers would charge customers by the square foot -- thinking that you could only put a certain number of computers in each square foot. But what Google's founders did was take cheap-assed commodity hardware, and built custom racks that could pack several times that number of computers in the same physical space. Genius.

Seeing all of those warped motherboards attached to corkboard reminds me the computer I used as my first "server" (although that is way too grandiose a term). I had an extra ATX motherboard, but the only extra case I had lying around was an AT desktop case. So, the motherboard just sat on the bottom of the case, not actually bolted to anything. And I had some paper lining the case to prevent shorts. *sigh*

Anyway, seeing that old hardware really brings me back. The post on Coding Horror also has a lot of good information. Check out the commentary on Dell, which I think is right on.