A closer look
Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the first Google server storage enclosure entirely out of Lego bricks in 1996 because they were broke Stanford students who needed a cheap, expandable way to house their ten four-gigabyte hard drives. They specifically utilized the colorful plastic toy blocks so they could easily pop the case open and swap out hardware components whenever the drives inevitably failed. This hilariously janky, primary-colored tower of children's toys was the physical foundation for a search algorithm that would eventually index the entire wealth of human knowledge. Now Google owns massive, hyper-secure server farms scattered across the globe, but their empire essentially started in a dorm room toy box
