Computer Racks Then and Now |
 A
few weeks ago there were photos circulating showing the grand magnitude
of
Google's server warehouses that crunch through trillions of bytes
of data every day and store practically all the knowledge on Earth.
Even though enormous high tech buildings, laboratories, and machines
are so commonplace nowadays that we barely manage a feeble "wow" no
matter the level of accomplishment, even at something like a million
square feet of computers all wired into a massive network to do searches,
draw maps, and serve YouTube videos. It made me think of the pictures
on
The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park,
 U.K.,
where the number of valve (vacuum tube)
switches in an entire rack of computer circuitry
(that broke German and Japanese code during WWII)
is less than that contained in a single USB driver IC in just one of
Google's computers. We've come a long way, baby, but it is nothing compared
to where we're headed in the next couple decades.
Posted January 2013 |
