INTERNET YEARS ARE LIKE DOG YEARS

INTERNET YEARS ARE LIKE DOG YEARS, SOME have said, which helps to explain the "museum piece" in the basement of the William Gates Center. A glass case in the hallway holds the original disk storage where Ph.D. candidates and Google founders LARRY PAGE and SERGEY BRIN tested a new page-ranking algorithm on the web in 1996. The breakthrough became the basis for the Google search engine. The pair needed more memory than could be found on the largest disk drive available at the time -- 4 gigabytes -- so they assembled 10 drives inside an improvised cabinet made from plastic and Lego blocks. Other blasts from the not-so-distant past in the basement exhibit: a clunky yellow plastic mouse and 5.25-inch floppy disks.

Cardinal Chronicle / weekly campus column
Stanford Report, May 23, 2001

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