I worked for geocities as a front end person back then. We got to work on some cool javascript stuff for the page builder app that was really pretty far ahead for its time. I got into trouble for bringing a laptop with suse linux on it into the office, back then linux was considered a major security risk, you notice all the machines are from Sun. They were also very early adopters of server side java, but most of the plumbing was composed of c code, the javascript people were kept far away from the server side and we didn't make it up to yahoo, but they did snatch up almost all of the unix admins.
Great memories. During this era, I was at Citysearch and spent a lot of time in the Orange County Exodus DC. We had a nice rack of Sun gear, Extreme Networks switches and Alteon AceDirector load balancers.<p>I remember vividly that there was a cage down the row from us that was populated entirely by eMachines, which were a low end desktop PC that you could buy at Circuit City and Best Buy. We laughed at their cage but the company, 911gifts.com, ended up getting acquired for a nice sum, while our site and company was basically gone a few years later.
I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era.<p>I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.
We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff.<p>They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.<p>We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now <i>used</i> and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.<p>Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.<p><a href="http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk</a>
<i>"As you can imagine (and see from these pictures), this equates to a whole bunch of ethernet cables. Cable management gets increasingly difficult to grasp each time a new box is added to the mix</i>"<p>Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and <i>I</i> got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this.<p>Thankfully there is <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/</a> to cure that.
So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.
I had forgot that GeoCities started migrating to NetApp filers after the Yahoo! acquisition. As many thousands (tens of thousands?) of the filers they bought from NetApp, Yahoo! really shouldve bought them when they had the chance I feel.
Not sure what's the best find, the data center article or the author's boy band-esque photo: <a href="http://www.detritus.org/mike/pics/inpark.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.detritus.org/mike/pics/inpark.jpg</a>
Good memories.<p>Does anyone remember where an Exodus colo facility was in SF around that same time (1999-2001)? That was my first visit to the area and I can't seem to locate the neighborhood now that I live here.