"For reference, we have more than an order of magnitude more now :-) What's more amazing though is that a very small number of current servers (3-4, but that's just a guess) have as much compute and storage as these 21 racks, so we could serve 1999's traffic on just these 3-4 servers."
While the hardware is cute, it's not the real story. It seems like most of the large computing companies essentially migrate to being vast operations-centric organizations once they find a hardware/software mix that earns money and scales. Now Amazon is selling access to part of that infrastructure, and we have mechanical turks as well. No individual actually even knows what they do anymore, rather they just approximate some kind of notion and only ever check when measured state moves out of defined parameters of normalcy. Next step... [TRANSMISSION TERMINATED BY ORDER OF SKYNET]
