By Steve Cole — 19 Jan 2026

Inside the Machine: Internet Servers

This is part 3 of a trio of stories about my son learning about the internet. The first was on the languages that build the web. The second was about what happens behind the scenes when you click a link. This final installment discusses what happens on the remote side of those clicks; on the servers in data centers, as we discussed a bit in our story on the two clouds. It is written with a twist to a popular movie. See if you can guess it.

My son got his key, the game opened, and forty-five minutes later the server kicked him.

Not a crash. Not his internet. The server just... stopped. Mid-match, three kills from victory, his whole squad rubber-banding across the map before the disconnect screen appeared like a funeral notice.

"SERVER CONNECTION LOST"

He sat there, staring at the screen, feeling the specific rage of a gamer who just got robbed by infrastructure. His teammates were already in Discord, swearing. Someone blamed Riot. Someone blamed their ISP. Someone blamed Mercury being in retrograde.

But he was thinking about something else.

Last month, he'd learned what happens when you click. The journey. DNS, routing, TLS, the whole internet that he likened to a grid. He understood now that his game wasn't magic, it was requests and responses, packets screaming across the internet, servers validating and calculating and sending back results.

So what went wrong?

Not where in the journey. He got that part. But what was on the other end? What was actually running his game? What broke?

He wanted in. Again. Deeper this time.

Return to the Grid

The first time, he fell in by accident. Frustration at 2am and a journey he didn't expect. This time, he went looking.

Not literally, obviously. He's not insane. But he started reading. Asking questions. Poking around in places gamers don't usually go. You know: documentation, architecture blogs, that mass of technical knowledge that powers everything he plays but stays invisible unless you look for it.

What he found was a world. Multiple worlds, actually. Different ways of building the same thing. Different philosophies. Different eras.

And the deeper he went, the more he recognized his dad's fingerprints. Not directly — it's not like there's a plaque somewhere that says "Steve Cole Was Here." But the patterns. The architectures. The decisions that shaped how things work. Things he'd heard in conversations but not really caught.

Decades of choices, made by people who cared, stacked on top of each other like geological layers.

He started at the beginning.

The Villages

There are places on the Grid that feel almost pastoral. Quiet. Stable. A little dusty, maybe, but in a comfortable way. Like small towns where everyone knows each other and nothing much changes because nothing much needs to. And almost entirely populated with the same players. LAMPs.

Linux. Apache. MySQL. PHP.

This stack built the early web. It's still running a staggering amount of it; WordPress alone powers something like 40% of all websites, and WordPress is LAMP all the way down. Blogs, small businesses, portfolios, restaurants, churches, local newspapers. The long tail of the internet lives here.

The architecture is simple. A Linux server runs Apache, which handles web requests. PHP processes the logic (as can other languages, but PHP was "the language" when the stack first appeared), talks to MySQL for data, and assembles a response. One server. One stack. Ordinary. Predictable.

Most here aren't trying to scale to a billion users. They don't need to. They're building something small and specific, and LAMP does exactly what they need without drama. But they can, and some do.

My son had expected this part of the Grid to feel abandoned. Legacy code. Technical debt. The ruins of an older internet.

Instead, it felt chosen.

People live here because it works. Because it's cheap. Because they understand it completely. Like owning your house; you mow your own lawn and you know your neighbors.

On the outskirts, he found older things still. A Perl wizard living in a tower, still writing regex incantations that nobody else could read. "There's more than one way to do it," the wizard muttered, twisting his code into something akin to hieroglyphics that worked perfectly. Somewhere in the basements of corporations that had forgotten it existed, his scripts still ran. Parsing logs. Moving files. Holding things together with duct tape and sigils.

His dad's first projects were probably built here. Aside from Slackware Linux and DEC Alphas, he wasn't wrong. Before he was born. Before the web was anything more than a curiosity; a Mozilla upgrade from UUNET. Someone, somewhere, spun up a LAMP stack and started building.

The village isn't dying. It's just quiet. And there's nothing wrong with quiet.

The Artisan Districts

Between the villages and the sprawl, he found neighborhoods that felt different. Intentional. Opinionated.

Ruby. Rails.

The buildings here were beautiful. Clean lines, elegant structure, everything in its right place. Convention over configuration — if you followed the rules, the framework did the rest. "Move fast and ship features" was carved above every door, but tastefully.

Twitter was born here. GitHub. Shopify. Basecamp. Companies that needed to build something real, fast, without getting lost in boilerplate.

The residents had strong opinions about code quality. About developer happiness. About the right way to do things. It could feel a little precious, maybe. A little smug. But the code they shipped? It felt good to write. That counted for something.

Some people never left. Some moved on when their applications outgrew the neighborhood. But nobody forgot what they learned here.

The Suburbs

But my son didn't stay long. The village was interesting, but it wasn't where his games lived. Those needed more. More speed, more scale, more everything.

He followed the traffic outward, and the Grid changed.

More buildings. More movement. More noise. The architecture sprawled in every direction, developments bleeding into developments, everything connected by a tangle of dependencies that seemed to grow overnight.

Welcome to JavaScript. All of it.

MongoDB. Express. Angular — or React, or Vue, depending on which block you're on. Node.

MEAN (or MExN). The acronym changes depending on your frontend religion, but the idea is the same: what if we used one language everywhere?

Frontend? JavaScript. Backend? JavaScript. Database queries? Well, MongoDB stores JSON documents, so basically JavaScript. The same syntax from the browser to the server to the data layer.

He kind of loved it. One language to rule them all. Learn JavaScript, build anything.

But then he looked closer.

And the dependencies. Dear god, the dependencies.

He opened a node_modules folder once, just to see. It contained the entire universe. Packages depending on packages depending on packages, a fractal of code written by mass of people who may or may not still maintain it. Somewhere in there, probably, was a package that did one tiny thing that seventeen other packages relied on, written by some developer in 2014 who had no idea they were holding the internet together.

Every few months, something breaks. A package gets deprecated. A maintainer walks away. A version conflict cascades through the ecosystem like a shockwave. And thousands of developers scramble to fix builds they didn't know were fragile.

But it's honest chaos. You can see node_modules. You can open it, stare into the abyss, and accept your fate.

Not like Python.

His dad had opinions about Python. Strong ones. Something about virtual environments and "which Python" and paths that don't exist. He hadn't been hurt by Python yet, but he'd seen the look in his father's eyes. The thousand-yard stare of a man who's debugged pip at 3am.

JavaScript had problems, but at least it kept them where you could see them.

The suburb wasn't elegant. But it moved fast. Startups lived here, shipping features at a pace the village couldn't match. The chaos was the point. Build it, ship it, fix it later.

If there was a later.

The Corporate Districts

And then there was Java.

My son almost walked past them a few times. The buildings were massive, gray, institutional. The kind of architecture that takes years to construct and never falls down. Enterprise. Banks. Insurance companies. Government systems.

Spring. J2EE. Abstract factory patterns and dependency injection containers and XML configuration files that stretched for miles.

Nobody called Java sexy. Nobody bragged about their Java side projects at parties. But Java was employed. Java was stable. Java ran the systems that moved money and kept records and didn't go down because someone forgot a semicolon.

The corporate districts weren't exciting. But when he looked closer, he realized: half the serious infrastructure on the Grid ran through here. Quietly. Reliably. While everyone else chased trends.

His dad had probably worn a tie in buildings like these. Written code that still ran somewhere, decades later, doing something important that nobody thought about until it broke.

The City Centers

The traffic kept pulling him forward.

Past the suburbs, past the sprawl, into something else entirely. The Grid changed again. The buildings got taller. Then they got impossible — structures that seemed to materialize from nothing, exist for moments, then vanish.

No servers here. Not in the traditional sense. No machines humming in racks, no processes running whether you need them or not.

Just functions. Events. Triggers.

Lambda. API Gateway. DynamoDB. S3.

JAWS.

The name came from an old framework, back when serverless was a new concept. JavaScript + AWS. Someone thought it sounded like a blockbuster, a shark eating your legacy infrastructure. The framework rebranded years ago, but the teeth remained.

My son watched a request arrive. A function spun up to handle it — code that didn't exist a millisecond ago, conjured from nothing, executed, then gone. The response flew back. The function dissolved. No idle compute. No wasted capacity. You paid for exactly what you used, measured in milliseconds.

It was elegant. Terrifying, but elegant.

Nobody owned anything here. You didn't run servers. You didn't manage infrastructure. You just wrote functions and trusted the platform to execute them whenever, wherever, however it decided.

The city scaled infinitely. Traffic spikes that would crush the village or sprawl through the suburbs? The city just absorbed them. More functions. More instances. More capacity appearing from thin air.

Posters covered every surface. YAML configurations praising Kubernetes, the orchestration layer that managed the chaos. Deployments and services and ingress controllers, all defined in indentation-sensitive manifests that broke if you looked at them wrong. The propaganda promised automation, scalability, infrastructure as code. The reality was hundreds of lines of configuration just to run a container. But the city believed. The city scaled.

But you couldn't see the machines. You couldn't touch them. When something broke, you checked dashboards and logs and metrics, but you never really knew what happened inside. It was abstraction all the way down.

His dad had built things here too. Helped companies make the jump — from data centers they owned, to clouds they rented, to serverless architectures where the very concept of "a server" became quaint and compute was treated like a utility. The evolution of an industry, compressed into a career.

He stood in the city and felt small. The village he could understand. The suburb he could navigate. But this?

This was infrastructure as pure thought. Code without a home. Logic without a body.

And then he noticed something else.

The Pattern

It started small. A flicker at the edge of perception.

The matchmaking that found him a game in thirty seconds, balanced teams, similar skill levels, optimal server location. It wasn't just an algorithm. It was learning. Every match fed back into it, adjusting, improving, predicting.

The anti-cheat that watched everything, analyzing player behavior hundreds of times per second, flagging patterns no human could see. It didn't just catch cheaters. It learned what cheating looked like before anyone told it.

NPCs that didn't move like code. Dialogue systems that actually responded to context. Recommendations that knew what he wanted before he searched.

In the heart of the city, woven through everything, he caught glimpses of something else.

Patterns that moved like they were thinking.

Not alive. Not conscious. But not just code either. Something emergent. Something that arose from the data, from the scale, from the sheer volume of human behavior flowing through the Grid every second of every day.

When the patterns communicated, it was in something serpentine. Indentation-sensitive. A language his dad had warned him about, now slithering through the infrastructure, powering things that learned.

He didn't have a name for it yet. Not really. His dad probably did. His dad had probably built some of it.

But he just stood there, watching the patterns pulse, and wondered what else was waking up inside the machine.

The Return

The server came back online eventually. They always do.

Finally, my son rejoined his squad. They dropped into another match. He got his kills, won his games, did the thing he'd come to do.

But part of him was still in the city. Still watching those patterns.

His game worked now. The infrastructure held. Requests went out, responses came back, the Grid did its job.

Except now he knew what was running underneath. The village, the suburb, the city. Different architectures for different problems. An evolution from simple to complex, from owned to rented, from human-scale to something else entirely.

And in the center of it all, something he couldn't quite name.