In the course of compiling what I plan to be an extensive bibliography on
computer history, I came across an unexpected number of books about Google.
I list them below in chronological order. As I have not read any of them, I
cannot make any informed comment about their contents or quality.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
Transformed Our Culture
John Battelle
2005; Portfolio / Penguin Group

The Google Story
David A. Vise and Mark Malseed
2005; Delacort Press / Bantam Dell / Random House, Inc.

Googleed: The End of the World As We Know It
Ken Auletta
2009; The Penguin Press

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
Douglas Edwards
2011; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Steven Levy
2011; Simon & Schuster

Google: How Google Works
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg with Alan Eagle
2014; Grand Central PUblishing / Hachette Book Group

and also:

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
Fred Vogelstein
2013; Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
Scott Galloway
2017; Portfolio / Penguin

On 2021-10-27, Questor <usenet@only.tnx> wrote:
>
> In the course of compiling what I plan to be an extensive bibliography on
> computer history, I came across an unexpected number of books about Google.
> I list them below in chronological order. As I have not read any of them, I
> cannot make any informed comment about their contents or quality.
>
>
> The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
> Transformed Our Culture
> John Battelle
> 2005; Portfolio / Penguin Group
>

What I would like to know about Google, is this. I read around the
time that Google started, that is was originally powered by massive
numbers of second hand machines. Was that true.?

--
greymausg@mail.com
That's not a mousehole!

Maus <Greymaus@mail.com> writes:
> What I would like to know about Google, is this. I read around the
> time that Google started, that is was originally powered by massive
> numbers of second hand machines. Was that true.?

The First Google Doodle Was a Burning Man Stick Figure. The images the
world has been seeing for the past 15 years come to us via the Nevada
desert.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-first-google-doodle-was-a-burning-man-stick-figure/279416/
The first Google Doodle was an out-of-office message. The day was
August 30, 1998 -- nearly two years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin had
built a search engine in a Stanford dorm room, and less than a week
before Google would officially incorporate as a company. Google was so
young then, indeed, that it still had a Yahoo!-style exclamation mark as
part of its logo.

Google Turns 23: Here Are 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The
Internet Giant
https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/google-turns-23-here-are-10-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-google-2555079
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a house made of Lego bricks to
house their first server. It contained 10 disks of 4GB each. You can
check it out here.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/0-4-Google.htm
above says as of sept2000, google was operating 5000 "PCs" running Linux

.... go down to silicon valley electronic stores and buy the parts (or
catalog order) to build/assemble your own machines ... starting in the
90s, there was big overlap with the commodity servers assembled for
cloud operation and processors assembled for commodity cluster
supercomputing (SLAC had very large machine room that replaced IBM
mainframes with huge number of racks containing assembled blades)

We were doing some consulting with small client/server startup that
wanted to do payment transactions on their servers ... they had also
invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted to use, now frequently
called "electronic commerce". I was doing the web gateways to the
financial payment networks and working on multiple layers of firewalls.

One of the persons that I was working with was also over at Google
involved in transaction load balancing to the growing number of backend
servers. Originally started out with internet facing routers doing
A-record rotation in the google DNS servers (i.e. mapping from url to
multiple IP-addresses, constantly changing order of the IP-addresses in
the list). Problem was that ISPs had several hour caching of DNS
responses ... so google DNS a-record rotation wasn't very dynamic. Lots
of code was then added to the internet facing routers to share backend
server traffic statistics and dynamically load-balance routing traffic
to the backend servers.

current cloud megadatacenters may have over half million (rack mount
blade) servers that they assemble for small fraction of the cost of
brand name servers. Around a decade ago, server chip vendors had press
that they were shipping half their products directly to cloud operators
(about the same time that IBM sold off its server business).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

On Sun, 2021-10-31, Maus wrote:
> On 2021-10-27, Questor <usenet@only.tnx> wrote:
>>
>> In the course of compiling what I plan to be an extensive bibliography on
>> computer history, I came across an unexpected number of books about Google.
>> I list them below in chronological order. As I have not read any of them, I
>> cannot make any informed comment about their contents or quality.
>>
>>
>> The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
>> Transformed Our Culture
>> John Battelle
>> 2005; Portfolio / Penguin Group
>>
>
> What I would like to know about Google, is this. I read around the
> time that Google started, that is was originally powered by massive
> numbers of second hand machines. Was that true.?

I'd like to know too. The fact or factoid stuck in my mind, because
I /wanted/ it to be true. Which makes me a bit suspicious.

/Jorgen

--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . .
\X/ snipabacken.se> O o .