Hello,
I wondered if I could save space on my computer’s hard drive if I deleted all my emails (in hotmail), but I wasn’t sure if they were actually stored on my computer. And if they aren’t on my computer, where are all those megabytes stored? Is there some kind of mega computer that contains all the sites of the internet or how does that work exactly?
Thanks in advance!
PS: Congratulations for the great initiative of this site!
Answer
Your emails from hotmail (or other providers such as Gmail) are stored on the hard drives of the servers of those companies. Every time you read your email, a copy will be forwarded to you. Those computer systems from Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and the like are indeed gigantic: halls the size of a few football fields, containing tens of thousands of computers and hard drives, and all of which are linked together with a very fast network. To the outside world, they appear as a single gigantic computer. Something similar applies to the search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Answered by
Prof Herman Bruyninckx
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/
.