Meghan McCarty Carino

Yes, yes.

It might be hard to picture, given the gleaming campuses of big tech companies today, but a lot of early Internet creators, like the founders of AltaVista, were in spaces like this one.

It's kind of spooky down here.

It was dark with creepy blue lighting and a maze of mesh cages to lock away servers.

This was the first cage of PAX back in 1996.

That is the big reason we're here.

PAX is short for the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which pioneered the business model that co-location companies use today and really created the foundation for the modern Internet.

Here's how it worked.

Before PAX, the Internet was mostly operated by research institutions and a few large telecom providers.

They owned the virtual roads of the information highway.

And those roads didn't connect in very many places.

You had to pay tolls to jump from one network to another.

The innovation at PAX was to just plug a bunch of networks together in a neutral location, almost like a roundabout.

That created the system that helped make the cloud possible.

This is the home of the virtual world.

From telephone switchboards to early search engines to today's data-hungry AI companies, we humans have needed places like this to connect.

Maria Hollenhorst and Daniel Shin produced this episode.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.

The pressure is on for tech companies to be good neighbors.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.