The whole of the internet
This is a bit geeky. In 1995, I'm fairly positive I had a copy of most of the internet. Or specifically, the world wide web.

I worked for a (at the time) large IT support company, about 250 people all doing telephone suport for loads of companies too lazy to do it themselves. We were pioneers of the outsourced support really. Anyway, thats 250 people, all quite clued up and with quite a lot of kit.

We supported loads of things, and two in particular caught my attention. 1 - a new fangled web crawling program, and a program that would combine all the free space on networked PC's and use it as a giant, fault tolerant NAS - (quite brilliant really, and I've never seen anything like it since. I think someone could clear up wiht a decent modern version). Oh and we had a fucking awesome internet connection - I believe it was 128Kbps over ISDN. That, in 1995, was, as I said, fucking awesome.

There was only one thing for it. We should make a copy of the internet. We did some maths. You ready?

In 1995 there were about 200,000 websites, and we assumed 2Mb for each of them - thats 400GB. Trivial these days to store this. In 1995, the harddrives were about 1GB in decent PC's, and we had about 700 PC's knocking about.

Downloading 400GB over 128K is a different matter. in fact its about 10,000 hours. Never mind, we had time and more importantly a system administrator who was in on it and happy to oblige.

The internet access was shit at work for about 2 years.

It never really finished, the internet changed far to quickly for us to keep up.

However, for a lot of that time we had a local copy of the internet that we could search. You could find a website locally in about 3 to 4 hours. Beat that Google.

So, utterly futile but a fantastic waste of time and a hell of a learning curve.

Tell that to kids these days, and they wont believe you.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:06, 7 replies)

That is fantastic

( IHaveABadFeelingAboutThis most likely working from home on, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:24, closed)

I like this a lot
And so I click HARD.
( rofl harris, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 15:51, closed)

I am lead to believe...
... that a copy of the WWW will fit into a shipping container nowadays.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 18:57, closed)

arf
spiffing!
Remember the ISDN like it was yesterday, used to casually play CS on 64Kbps leaving one line open for the phone but would sometimes treat myself to a full 128Kbps!
(Is this it like eggs but better, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 20:47, closed)

As for the distributed NAS check out
www.wuala.com/ for a slightly similar concept.
(bill, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 13:16, closed)

I
was behind someone in a queue in Dixons (around '94-'95) as they handed over a 1.44 diskette and said:

"Can you put the internet on there for me please. It's costing me too much to dial up to view websites."
(dchurch bah, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:23, closed)

http://gluster.com
GlusterFS provides a pretty good distributed cluster based filesystem.
(Toucan - http://www.titmonday.com, Tue 29 Sep 2009, 12:07, closed)