2006 - OSM and University College London

University College London (UCL) has kindly been hosting OpenStreetMap since the project started. In the early days, Steve Coast, Matt Amos, Andy Allan, Grant Slater, and many others spent many hours extending and re-organising hardware to keep up with the growth of the project.

This photo is of Steve Coast’s desktop computer which doubled as OpenStreetMap’s first “server”. It’s pictured here in 2007 after it had been replaced in late 2006.

The last  new database server arrived at Imperial College in 2012. This would be our last spinning rust (mechanical harddisk) database server and had 36 drive bays! Future database servers used SSD disks.