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A photo showing green lights inside a Google data center

The book that led to my visit to Google.

A photograph of a textbook about computer architecture.

When I first visited Google back in 2002, I was a computer science professor at UC Berkeley. My colleague John Hennessey and I were updating our textbook on computer architecture, and Larry Page — who rode a hot-rodded electric scooter at the time — agreed to show me how his then three-year-old company designed its computing for Search. I remember the setup was lean yet powerful: just 6,000 low-cost PC servers and 12,000 PC disks answering 70 million queries around the world, every day. It was my first real look at how Google built its computer systems from the ground up, optimizing for efficiency at every level.

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