I must admit: I had to Google "Lawrence Page". Didn't strike me that Larry is the diminutive for Lawrence :-)
edit: proof that he was successful, indeed, is that "to google" is a verb that comes more naturally to me when speaking English than common name diminutives.
Your entire post history is defending the NSA, snarky comments that add nothing such as '[citation needed]', and general negativity/patronizing 'well actually...' or 'I can't believe anyone...' type statements.
You haven't looked hard enough. I think you've ignored my recent comments about YAGNI and security, the follow-ups to those '[Citation Needed]' where I actually find a citation or ask for one, the one where I politely ask for direction about the entertainment industry, and the general plethora of material from a technical perspective.
Your reply also implies there's something wrong with NSA apology, which there shouldn't be intrinsically, as I'm posting an alternative perspective. Similarly, I don't subscribe to the idea that short comments or snarky comments are necessarily bad if they contain facts or point out a lack thereof - it's outright rudeness, willful stupidity/ignorance (reddit style humor), and meanness that I object to. Everything you've pointed out is stylistic.
Needless to say, this is all irrelevant, because my post history has nothing to do with my comment - that being, it'd be nice if we can talk about the early days of Google without demonizing it for its (alleged) privacy violations.
But, by all means, ignore my original point and look through my comment history for things to nitpick and argue over. I'm not going to debate it further with you.
You surely know this, but for clarity: it's a Usenet group. Google inherited a huge Usenet archive when they acquired Deja News and used it as the core of what eventually became Google Groups. But it was never a corporate-maintained forum. Usenet was always distributed.
Ha! Hadn't ever seen that before. I wonder if they ended up working around it, ignored it until it was fixed, or threw their hands in the air and re-wrote the bot in C++.
Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.
So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.
Another detail I've stumbled on is that Sam Rushing, a talented Python programmer, had something to do with Python in Google's early history: http://www.nightmare.com/~rushing/ .
He also worked at eGroups. He wrote "medusa" which became asyncore in the Python standard library (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/). This was long before Java had async I/O. Interesting that Guido is working on the new async I/O interface "tulip" in the Python core after all these years!
And Larry Page's brother apparently also worked at eGroups.
Steven Levy's "In the Plex" is probably the best one. A lot of the stuff in my comment is mentioned there, and the rest is cobbled together from various presentations, blog posts, and Quora answers on the net.
"In the plex" and "I'm feeling lucky" - both are very good and offer very different angles. As you can guess by the name first is more formal history whereas second are memoirs of a their marketing guy who has got a very good sense of humour :)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...