On 8 May 2018 at 18:32, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

On 5/8/2018 6:22 PM, Henry Bent wrote:

My father was the sysadmin for Deja News at the time they were bought by Google. I was told that the "buyout" consisted of some Google folks showing up with a rack of drives, dumping all of Deja News's data over a weekend, and then flying back out to Mountain View.

Where are the original drives? Or tapes? (insert devilish grin emoticon here)

ak

I have no idea where they are now. At the time they were in Austin, TX. I imagine that they probably just went to one of those many IT scrapyards, the warehouses full of old parts that the owners sell on eBay.

About the same time - 2001? - when I was a student at Oberlin, an alumnus who was working for mp3.com "donated" several full height racks of 2U servers to the college. Apparently the tax writeoff for donating the servers was better than what they were going to get from the scrap folks, and it all looked good on paper. But the CS department had no idea what to do with all of this hardware! Remember that we were a small liberal arts college, and that the entire department at that time was served by a single DEC Alpha box. So there was a free-for-all, everyone in the CS department got to take as many machines as they had a use for (dual Pentium III Intel boards, as I recall), which turned out to not make a significant dent in the material we were given... The most astonishing part of the whole experience was that mp3.com had not bothered to wipe the drives of these machines, so they still booted to some variety of Linux (Red Hat?) and were full of useless distributed data.

-Henry