Shipping docking great wads of computer power around in containers is nothing new. IBM was shipping 43xx series computers around in the backs of trucks to people who needed short-term computer power in the 1980s for definite. Set the lorry up in the car park, a couple of extra wires and away you went. (That it happened to be mostly IBM sites that needed it doesn't matter.)

In the mid 80's I worked for an oil service company in Scotland. We would ship a container containing DEC PDP systems and data capturing equipment out to oil platforms around the world where they could be bolted to the deck , connected to a power supply and be self contained data capturing and analysis offices. They could then be relocated as required.

Plus ca change, la meme chose....

Some ten years ago, we had to rebuild the air conditioning in the main machine room (it couldn't cope with the hot summer in 95-96). For a suitable fee, Digital sent a large truck with a container-sized body, filled with VAXes and disk racks, which truck sat in our car park for a month while the work was done. The only downtime was at weekends to do the disk replication. Surely this counts as prior art.

*Google* have taken the patent, and it's on a completely different technology from Blackbox anyway. Blackbox is really only a proof of concept although it's all usable technology. I'd have one in my back yard, if my back yard wasn't the size of a stamp.

I understand that Sun has sold numbers of boxes, not in black but in camouflage...

Since everybody knows about all the prior art, why is Google bothering to patent it? Does it just want to feed the lawyers some more? Maybe the lawyers are paid per patent filed and defended.

Ericsson did this in the mid-90's with both semis and shipping containers stuffed with switch gear and computer systems (mostly Sun..) Google's a troll.

Does the Patent office actually REVIEW patents anymore??? Maybe they have forgotten that they are supposed to review the IDEAS expressed in the patents and not just the FORMAT of the patent!

Idiots.

In Finland at 1997 local HP executives proudly presented me a truck, which contained HP 3000 and HP 9000 series computers. It had cooling and power, etc. This truck was used as backup datacentre solution, which rolled into place when something happened with their service clients.

This patent is odd...

I also saw a series in the 80s about a data center mounted in the back of a large truck, that could even accommodate a vehicle equipped with a voice-activated server.

How can google patent something that's already a part of the public domain? The US government has been doing that for decades in the military, which is paid for courtesy of the US tax payer, should any revenue gained from Googles "patent" be given back to anybody who pays taxes, as a 'thank you' for the idea?

Haven't Sungard offered this kind of service for years. Loose your data centre and we'll ship a new one on the back of a truck that you can put in the car park until you rebuild.

I'm sure they offered this service to me in 2002 when I was doing a DR plan.

So what does putting it in a container add, ah yes vertical scalability.

Next you know some one will try and patent putting things in boxes, after all that's all a container is.