Yes­ter­day CNET unveiled the first pic­tures of the servers that power Google. As expected, the machines are bru­tally sim­ple. But—in typ­i­cal fash­ion for an arti­cle about Google—the story pro­ceeds to heap adu­la­tion on their “sig­nif­i­cant,” “inno­v­a­tive,” and “once-secret” approach of plac­ing the backup power bat­tery inside the server. Google cares about energy, it says. Google has patents on this technology.

Well, Google my ass. The IBM AS/400 server, for exam­ple, shipped with in-server bat­tery backup as stan­dard equip­ment in 1988. Accord­ing to a 2001 arti­cle in the IBM Jour­nal of Research and Devel­op­ment, IBM design­ers came to the same con­clu­sions as Google over twenty years ago, although they were prob­a­bly moti­vated more by reliability-per-dollar than the price of electricity.

They way peo­ple write about Google today reminds me of the way peo­ple wrote about the Media Lab in the 1990’s.