Welcome back to Book Overflow. Today we dive into the second third of Steven Levy’s In The Plex, where Google reshaped computing forever. Levy shows how “computing as a utility” went from theory to reality when Google built massive data centers powered by thousands of commodity servers. Rather than owning hardware, users tapped into an invisible network—what we now call the cloud. This vision led directly to Gmail, born from a quest for cheap, reliable storage. As Levy puts it, “We wanted to make storage so abundant that spam detection could run on every message in real time.” The result was a free email service with search built in—a radical departure from the inboxes of the day. Alongside, innovations like MapReduce and Bigtable transformed how data is processed and stored at scale. By the end of this section, it’s clear that Google didn’t just ride the cloud wave—it made the wave. Thanks for listening to Book Overflow. Next time, we’ll explore the final chapters of In The Plex.
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