A historic home tour of the virtual world
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What historical significance does 529 Bryant St. hold in tech history?
A historic home tour of the virtual world. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Sometimes things are not as they appear. I understand this is actually a data center.
Yes, you wouldn't believe it walking by. And it has a very interesting story to how we shape the Internet today.
We're in downtown Palo Alto, California, for our series on AI infrastructure. Eddie Espinoza is the customer operations manager of the data center that is hiding inside this ornate old building.
Let's go inside, take a look.
How does Equinix operate within the data center at this landmark?
It's owned by a company called Equinix, which is one of those companies that you might not personally have heard of, but without knowing it, you're connected to all the time. Equinix specializes in something called co-location, which is kind of like apartment buildings for computing power, where customers can lease space for their data traffic. Equinix has data centers all over the country, and they're building more in hopes of capitalizing on the AI boom. But this one is special.
It is a historical building in the historical society of Palo Alto.
It was built in 1929 by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company as a place for telephone switchboards.
Over the decades, those voices changed to bits and bytes, but the need to connect never changed.
Once inside, Eddie took us into a room with racks of servers humming away.
Every single fiber cable you see here is a different customer, internet service provider, cloud provider, enterprise company. You know, people think the internet's just in the air floating, but it requires physical connections. So we can go downstairs and we'll look at the early era of the internet.
We'll be right back. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. This is Marketplace Tech. We're continuing our series on AI infrastructure today with a historical tour of a building that helped create the modern internet.
What role did AltaVista play in the evolution of the internet?
This is the basement. So in the 1995 era, it was the home of AltaVista. It was one of the first major search engines in the 90s. So they're all office spaces down here, as you notice.
Wait, so they had their office spaces down here with all this machinery? 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.
How did the Palo Alto Internet Exchange change internet connectivity?
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.
They saw that in order to make the internet grow, this is what needed to be happening.
That created the system that helped make the cloud possible.
What connections exist between early telephone switchboards and today's AI companies?
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What historical significance does 529 Bryant St. hold in tech history?
0:01–0:48
2
How does Equinix operate within the data center at this landmark?
0:48–2:19
3
What role did AltaVista play in the evolution of the internet?
2:19–3:02
4
How did the Palo Alto Internet Exchange change internet connectivity?
3:02–3:54
5
What connections exist between early telephone switchboards and today's AI companies?
3:54–4:39