Terraserver was definitely one of those “Wow!” moments of the early web.

Lots of detail on the architecture, in a paper with Jim Gray as a co-author:

https://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/msr_tr_99_29_terras...

One of the hottest applications on the Internet of the time, and they hosted it on 8 servers!

It would almost be amiss not to mention the amazing work done by Asobo and Microsoft on Flight Simulator 2020 in this context. The whole world has come to life with such beauty as I would never have been able to imagine when I first saw Flight Simulator in the early 80s.

Mind you as children we were perfectly able to fill in the blanks. Yet, the latest version with its highly variable and dynamic weather systems, with spectacular lighting, has really hit the mark for me.

It too uses Microsoft's storage to access data impossible to contain locally in entirety, be it Azure based this time. It would be interesting to learn more about this transition, if related.

Yeah I think they had a deal with Compaq or something for some aspect of (commodity) hardware.

DEC, which Compaq bought. http://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/msr_tr_98_17_terrase...

DEC Alpha was the first readily available 64 bit architecture for micro/mini computer sizes. Terraserver was in part a demo of how powerful that was. So was Altavista, the first really successful Web search engine. It started as a DEC research demo program.