Web Talk

Have you ever asked yourself what Google was like when it was not  Google? Nowadays, the world’s most famous search engine has got datacenters and servers all over the world and it manages to store, keep ,track and store millions of information per day. But when Google was more than a project in some unknown room at Stanford University well, its appearance was something quite different and more…humble.  Let’s find out a little more about its origins!

First of all, back in 1997 Google was a a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University. The picture above shows you the setup where Google managed to run. The original platform was written in Java and Python and was hosted on the following hardware:

• Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
• 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers (donated by Intel) with 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. The main search ran on these.
• F50 IBM RS/6000 (donated by IBM) with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
• Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
• IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives (donated by IBM).
• Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.

Still in 1997, the  Backrub website had the following description to describe itself:

BackRub is a “web crawler” which is designed to traverse the web.

Currently we are developing techniques to improve web search engines. We will make various services available as soon as possible.

Sorry, many services are unavailable due to a local network faliure [sic] beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up soon. 12/4/97

What follows are a couple of pics showing you the Backrub logo and the first Google homepage:

Source: Pingdom.com.