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?

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Aside from uptime, website performance is something we talk a lot about here at Pingdom. There are lots of ways to improve the speed of your website, but this post will focus on ways to optimize the size and number of files your website uses, both being important factors affecting the load time.

The files we are talking about are of course the files that are delivered to a visitor when they load your website, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and most important in this case, images.

Since images usually make up most of the size of a website, we will focus the majority of this article on image optimization.

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This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.

And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).

Read the full post for plenty of more pictures and cool information.

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Bumper stickers give people a chance to express their personality. So, what happens when the car owner is a dedicated computer geek (like us Pingdom-ites)?

This is what happens.

Go on for 15 photos that will put a smile on your face.

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The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) probably hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone who has used a computer in the last decade or so. If you haven’t seen it on your own PC, you probably know someone it has happened to.

There is actually a ridiculous amount of BSOD photos to be found around the Web. And not just of PCs. As this post will show you, the blue error screen seems to show up everywhere, and often in highly unexpected locations.

This is a collection of some of the very best ones we could find. Enjoy!

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InformationWeek has managed to get an inside look at 1&1’s Lenexa, Kansas data center, built inside a former storage facility. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies in the world (arguably the largest), and this data center certainly isn’t small.

The data center has five server rooms with a total of 860 racks and can handle at least 40,000 servers.

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We here at Pingdom are computer geeks, and proud of it. None of us have any geeky vanity plates (custom license plates) on our cars, though. But others have, and we love those. This post is a gallery of pictures of some of the coolest vanity plates we have ever seen, collected from around the [...]

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(We would like issue a warning to sensitive viewers. This can be hard to watch. ) The iPhone finally launched here in Sweden this July and some of us at Pingdom have already bought one. We love our iPhones. So we can only image what it must feel like to have your shiny new iPhone [...]

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A Network Operations Center rests at the heart of every telecom network or major data center, a place to keep an eye on everything. Some of these NOCs are really “dressed to impress”, while others have taken a more mundane approach. So, for inspiration, here is a set of pictures of different NOCs from telecom [...]

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There has been a lot of talk about container data centers lately (sometimes also called modular data centers). Most of the time we are only presented with an image of a branded shipping container, but let’s face it, all the interesting stuff is on the inside! So, since we were curious, we here at Pingdom [...]

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