I think my favorite part of this was:

It has culminated in the WebBase project whose aims are to maintain a local copy of the World Wide Web

Weird to think that a local copy of the internet was actually feasible only twelve years ago.

And it took up roughly 150 GB. Six average BluRay movies take up as much space on disk as the 1998 internet. Hosting that much on Amazon S3 would cost about $20 per month, not including bandwidth bills.

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

It goes to show that even if space and bandwidth are cheap (and they will only get cheaper), creating content will always be enormously expensive.

Even 1 SSD disk could hold all of that for cheaper than a 5gb hard drives back then.

Are you implying it isn't feasible today?

This is a bit surreal. 12 years ago, two of the most powerful men in the world were lowly graduate students...

Is that really uncommon? Where was your average "young powerful elite" a whole twelve years ago? I think that on average they were lowly grad students or undergrads a decade ago. The bounds for movement over 12 years is huge. It's a long time.

Sadly, only two.

In case anyone is curious, here is a working link to the paper for the Introduction class, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

So... they were teaching a whole course while they were PhD students?

Yeah; not that uncommon for a major research university.

Imagine having been a TA for this class...

It looks like the TA, Diane Tang, ended up at Google.

Twist ending!

Stanford has some bad-ass classes...