my daughter would be old enough to ask me the big, tough question that all kids inevitably pose: How does the internet work? The best answer I had prepared was “sorcery and electricity.” This is admittedly not as helpful as you might expect from someone who took a third-level university course called “Communications Technology” and once owned a book from the Scholastic Book Fair titledBut I dread that day no longer.
Well, technically, Vancouver’s most beautiful former bank. The Permanent Building, as it’s known, was first built in 1907 on Pender Street as an office for the B.C. Permanent and Loan Company, before being taken over by the Bank of Canada in ’35. More recently, it operated as an events venue—with neo-classical design details that make a beautiful backdrop foror launch parties for new flavours of vape juice .
Storing all of this data requires physical resources, including powerful servers—which, as I understand it, are sort of like oversized refrigerators that the internet’s brain is stuffed into. These servers house more than 145 petabytes of info, a number so big it sounds like a type of dinosaur. But you can’t just leave those servers out in the backyard like your friend’s mean stepdad who insists his German shepherd is an “outdoor dog.
Kahle bought the Permanent Building because it resembles the San Francisco headquarters of the Internet Archive . Apparently, the building will also be used to house meetings, parties and lectures in the future, so perhaps the Internet Archive does need more square footage than the averagebuilding is awfully fancy to be used as a storage locker, then shame on you.