Founded in 2003, the Pirate Bay turns a decade old September this year. Since its humble beginnings the notorious site has come a long way.

Today The Pirate Bay is spreading a world of information to millions of people every day through a complex network of cloud based servers hosted across the world.

However, in the first two years the hardware setup was rather primitive. The site first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months the site relocated to Sweden where more servers were added to keep up with the increase in traffic. One of these first servers has now been made available to the Computer Museum in Linköping where it’s now on permanent display.
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A Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak that the contents of the computer case in question were initially hosted in the blue box pictured here. In the same photo are also the three other servers that were operational at the time, a laptop, tower case and the red server box.
[…]
Earlier this year they moved most of their service to the cloud, where they currently run on 17 virtual machines. This latest move greatly reduced Pirate Bay’s power consumption, but it’s also less nostalgic as none of these cloud servers could ever go on display.
[‘First’ Pirate Bay Server on Permanent Display in Computer Museum sur TorrentFreak.com]

Un très bon point soulevé en fin d’article : après avoir perdu l’attachement physique que l’on avait envers les biens culturels désormais numériques, voilà qu’avec la virtualisation, on est entrain de se séparer de nos machines, et des souvenirs qui vont avec.

Le cloud ne pleut pas, mais peut-être qu’il saura nous faire pleurer.