There's a very interesting blog post over at Xooglers that gives us a glimpse inside Google's data center, circa 1999.

From Xooglers: Let's talk about U and me:

Imagine an enormous, extremely well-kept zoo, with chain link walls draped from floor to ceiling creating lines of large fenced boxes vanishing somewhere in the far, dark reaches of the Matrix. Inside each cage is a mammoth case (or several mammoth cases) constructed of stylish black metal and glass, crouched on a raised white tile floor into which cables dive and resurface like dolphins. <snip/> Clean, pristine and smoothly sculpted, these were more than machines, they were totems of the Internet economy. Here was eBay. Here Yahoo. Here Inktomi. Welcome to Stonehenge for the Information Age. <snip/> And then we came to Google's cage. Less than 600 square feet, it felt like a shotgun shack blighting a neighborhood of gated mansions. Every square inch was crammed with racks bristling with stripped down CPUs. There were 21 cabinets and more than 1,500 machines, each sprouting cables like Playdoh pushed through a spaghetti press.

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Via reddit