After seeing the AltaVista paper tape tweet, I wondered a bit about AltaVista history, since I do remember it and what a big deal it was that they were using the new-fangled 64-bit DEC Alpha processors to serve this super big site. From wikipedia:
AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface.[10]
As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space, and received 13 million queries every day.
"Hyperscale" has come quite a ways I guess...
