How Google Started

Google was originally a project at Stanford Univesity in the US. The earliest reference to it I could find in a few seconds of looking was 1997, and back then it had a somewhat less polished logo:

(This logo seems to break on Internet Explorer, probably because Microsoft are gay and Internet Explorer is gay. I mean this purely in the school playground insult manner, naturally.)
When it started looking like this search-engine thing might have legs and they started thinking about commercialising it all, they tried a little harder:

It was all run on university hardware, and they thoughtfully took photos of the kit they were using, which is linked to here: Google Hardware. Check the specs - dual Pentium II 300s - whoosh! But entertainingly my living room is beginning to resemble those photos...

All links and images are currently coming from the excellent Wayback Machine, so might be a tad slow. I'll make local copies as soon as I can =)