Today Google runs on huge data centers spread across the world. But at the very beginning, in the hands of two PhD students at Stanford University, there was a colorful box made from a childhood toy. Inside it, the data of the search engine that was Google's ancestor was spinning.
Stanford, 1996: the BackRub era
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students in engineering at Stanford. According to Stanford Engineering, the two met in 1995; Brin was giving a campus tour to admitted students that day. Page's advisor was Terry Winograd.
The pair's first project was called BackRub. The idea was to follow the links pointing to web pages backwards: the more pages linked to a page, and the higher the quality of those pages, the more valuable that page was. This idea later turned into the PageRank algorithm. According to Stanford Engineering, Google was first made available in August 1996 through Stanford's website. By January 1998 the project had taken the name Google.
This approach came at a cost: to follow links backwards, you first had to download and store a very large part of the web. In other words, the quality of the search engine depended directly on how much disk space it had.
A case made of toy bricks
Storing all those web pages took a lot of disk space, and the students' budget was limited. According to Stanford Engineering, in 1996 Page and Brin put ten 4-gigabyte hard drives into a case they built from toy building bricks, clear plastic and duct tape. The total capacity was 40 gigabytes.
The outside of the case was made of colorful LEGO bricks. This box spread around the world as Google's "first server". More precisely, it was a storage enclosure that housed the disks of the early system.
Where is it today?
The case itself was no technical marvel. The disks were ordinary, and the materials looked like they came out of a toy box. But that is exactly why it's interesting: Page and Brin weren't perfecting hardware, they were trying to store as much data as possible with the limited parts they had. The real value was in the ranking idea running inside the box.
This toy case didn't end up in the trash. According to Stanford Engineering, it is on display today at the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford. The Stanford Technology Ventures Program's page of entrepreneurship artifacts also gives its location as the basement of the building.
Some write-ups also say the case's colors inspired the Google logo. But that isn't an established fact in the sources, more of a well-loved interpretation. Let's note it as such.
| 1996 | Today |
|---|---|
| 10 disks of 4 GB | Data centers spread across the world |
| 40 GB in total | Hundreds of GB even on a single phone |
| Toy bricks, plastic and duct tape | Custom-designed server racks |
| A project that began in a student room | The world's most used search engine |
Small budget, big idea
Stories like this are also open to exaggeration over time. The sentence "Google was born on a server made of LEGO" sounds lovely but isn't quite right: the LEGO box housed only the system's disks, and the computing was done on other machines. The real story is interesting enough already.
Google was incorporated as a company on September 7, 1998 with a $100,000 check. But until that point, as Stanford Engineering tells it, the hardware was being pieced together in Page's dorm room and the project was getting support from the Stanford Digital Library Project.
Today 40 GB is less than the storage of many smartphones. In 1996 it was a serious amount of space for a student project, and it could only be achieved by lining up several disks side by side.
The LEGO case is a nice example of how brilliant ideas in technology don't always start with brilliant hardware. They needed disk space, they had no money, and they used whatever they had.
Think about this too: the two students who built that case would, within a few years, found one of the best-known companies in the world. But their starting point was not an investor pitch, it was the need for a box the disks would fit in.
Have you ever solved a project with the most unexpected material you had on hand?