google ostensibly started on beige boxes, though. They used whatever computers they could get cheaply and quickly, even older hardware sufficed. There was a nic

google ostensibly started on beige boxes, though. They used whatever computers they could get cheaply and quickly, even older hardware sufficed. There was a niche global group of people who could make stuff like that work as a much larger compute system (beowulf, etc). I don't know that it took "a lot of humans" to bootstrap.