July 17th, 2004
Google Enters The Computer History Museum
The Google Blog talks about Google entering The Computer History Museum.
We’re five years old and already they’re sticking us in a museum.
The museum’s display is of Google’s first corkboard server rack from 1999.
A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no fewer than 86 hand-installed cooling fans.
They’ve put up the photograph of the Original Atari Pont Arcade as well as a bonus. I had never seen it before so it was a small “wow” moment.
Thinking back on when Google first started operations and how they’ve grown and contributed to the Net directly and indirectly since then, it is a pretty incredible journey. The one thing I’ll probably always be happy about is how Google revolutionised not only the web-search technology but also the way it interacted with the user. Remember that we’re talking about the time Altavista, Yahoo!, HotBot and Excite were considered the 4 Horesemen and were exploiting their search technology and hold to promote their other services. Colourful, rich, graphic-laden pages. Google’s sparse look and super-fast loading pages were a refreshing change. I would venture to say that many people started using Google initially because they ‘perceived’ the searches to be faster. The part about them being better appears to me to have come on a later stage. Even now, with a plethora of services on offer, Google’s home page is still not busy. Their core focus remains web-search. When I go to Google, I am not distracted. I am not enticed by 20 different sales-people from the same store. There is a single core reason I’m there and they hand me the interface without much pomp or interference. To do that for 5 years is appreciable. To hold back the urge to promote another service by piggy-backing on another popular service for so long is incredible.
Great job guys. Keep it up.