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Almost 50 years ago, a small team at the Italian company Olivetti managed to do what no one had done before them; they created a computer small enough to fit on a desk, and could be used by regular people. It was the Programma 101, what many consider to be the world’s first personal computer.
At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.
Do you want to know more about how big websites like Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and others handle the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of visitors?
Well, you’re in luck, because many of those sites and services have engineering and/or developer blogs that share plenty of information about the challenges they have to deal with and the tools they use. This is an insider’s view that you usually can’t get anywhere else, giving us a unique view of what’s going on behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest web services.
Sometimes you just need to take a short break, relax and have fun. A great way to do so is to check out some funny web comics, and we here at Pingdom are big fans of comics that dive into the slightly more geeky aspects of life. Once a tech geek, always a tech geek…
So, sit back and relax, take a few moments to yourself and check out some of the best tech comics around.
We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today.
For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself?
We take search engines for granted these days. They exist because they have to. Without them, going through and finding relevant information in the millions and millions of pages that exist on the web would be an almost impossible task. For example, it would have been extremely time-consuming for us here at Pingdom to put [...]
Pingdom recently developed a custom status website for the Swedish web hosting company Binero. It’s basically a WordPress plugin, fully skinnable, which shows the current status of all servers and services of the web hosting company, as well as the uptime history for all services. The different services are categorized and grouped, and tech support [...]
We here at Pingdom clearly belong to the “geek category” of people here on Earth. We love computers and technology, and almost anything related to that. Even when the computers have been broken down and recycled, they can provide gratification, as shown by the pictures you see below. This is a collection of art (and [...]
Data Center Knowledge recently published a “Google Data Center FAQ”. As most other web geeks, we here at Pingdom tend to find this kind of information quite fascinating. We have extracted some interesting tidbits, and also used the information to construct a map with all current and under-construction Google data center locations that are known [...]
Nowadays we are used to having hundreds of gigabytes of storage capacity in our computers. Even tiny MP3 players and other handheld devices usually have several gigabytes of storage. This was pure science fiction only a few decades ago. For example, the first hard disk drive to have gigabyte capacity was as big as a [...]
