Modern Heath Robinsons

In a recent publication the following passage caught my eye:

Modern Heath Robinsons
When the two Stanford drop-outs who founded Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, launched the company in 1998, they went to Fry's, an electronics outlet where the Valley's hardcore computer hobbyists have always bought their gear. Even today, some of the data centres' servers appear to be the work of tinkerers: circuit boards are sagging under the weight of processors and hard disks, and components are attached by Velcro straps. One reason for the unusual design is that parts can be easily swapped when they break. But it also allows Google's servers to be made more powerful without having to be replaced completely. (From: The Future of Technology, by Tom Standage (ed) , 2005, Profile Books, The Economist)

Interesting, even more so because it made me think about what happened yesterday sometime around 11:00 CET, when my customized Google home page disappeared, poof, just like that. One moment it was there, the next, gone!
Back home later at night, it was still gone, so I started checking Google help pages. After about 10 clicks I ended up on a Google Group forum, where I see the comforting pages and pages of user posts, voicing their complaints in various pitches of panic about the same problem. At least I was not alone…

Not a word from Google, no announcement, no message, no nothing.
Was it one of those original 1998 velcro straps perhaps, that had come loose and dropped a fat hard disk on top of a circuit board?

Then, thinking about the lesson: just think that this happens to 10% of MySpace users, could this bring parts of the internet down, when literally millions (about 15 million in this case) of people start shouting virtually ‘what’s going on!?’ It brings home the realization that the internet has become part of life, as lives are lived. It’s no longer a place to just find information, or send an email, but a place where people simply 'are' as part of their daily activities.

Oh, and by the way, my customized Google home page was back this morning.
I see someone, swearing and sweating, with his head stuck deep in some server cabinet filled with spaghetti wiring, fishing the old piece of velcro out of the depths of a mass of circuit boards, swearing once again, then cheerfully replacing it by a fresh piece of velcro, and re-attaching the fallen component, ready to go for another ten years.