Two connected stories / the buildings
The cloud has an address.
The cloud has an address.
From one big computer to rooms full of servers
There is no single birthday for all data centers. Big computer rooms, networks, cloud services, and AI grew in stages.
- 1951
Big machines do big counts
The U.S. Census Bureau welcomed UNIVAC I in 1951. Early large computers needed special space and trained people.
- 1960s
Computers share more work
Large computers called mainframes helped businesses, science, and government. IBM's System/360 family arrived in 1964.
- 1989–1991
The Web helps people share
Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web at CERN in 1989. By the end of 1990, the first Web server was running. Web software spread in 1991.
- 2006
Rent computing over a network
Amazon launched its EC2 test service in 2006. Developers could rent computing power and change how much they used.
- Today
More work brings more questions
Data centers run websites, apps, and some AI work. The computers use power and give off heat. The next step is to ask what each site needs and what its neighbors need.
