Post

I worked at one of the big three *tower* real estate companies at the height of the wireless bubble. Companies that just owned the land, tower, power, & flashing lights & leased to all the providers to hang up their gear.

@somerandomdave.bsky.social

There was so much money flowing in 2003 that we built a datacenter that was mainly *for looks*. The walls were glass for easy touring. 40 plasma screens made to look like NORAD so that visiting AT&T executives would see our 10,000 dots on a huge map.

8/3/26, 10:01 pm3 reposts61 likes

Some Random Dave

@somerandomdave.bsky.social

The f**ked up thing is that the folks I'm moonlighting with have one of these (they aren't plasma screens, but LCDs have improved a lot), and they actually pretend sitting people at desks looking at the wall-o-screens is providing operational monitoring.

Some Random Dave

I mean, it _looks_ impressive if you don't understand it, but it doesn't actually provide useful information, and the people at the desks have zero ability to trigger any kind of response. And yet, the customer management has decreed that it will be staffed 24/7.

@somerandomdave.bsky.social

_Looking_ impressive is their entire career

Some Random Dave

Sad thing is that Nagios (now _there's_ a name from the distant past, but it was in a repo approved by their CM people) does a vastly better job at zero cost (well, beyond my billing rate for config, but that's still significantly cheaper than what they're paying for their solution).

All for show. We didn’t stare at a giant wall of monitors, if the power dropped or a bulb burnt out in a tower, we got SMS alerts. You had a few minutes to tell the FAA before you started pulling $1M/hour fine. The servers were purple to match the L3 switch, the CTO liked purple, thought it popped

@cpetersen-cs.bsky.social

There was so much cash flying around that when I’d spec out a new set of servers and get estimates they’d make me buy twice as many just to fill the racks the whole way.

Chris Petersen

I definitely remember discussions at Southwestern Bell about a policy of "if it's going into production, buy two" for a while. About the time my contract ended, they were starting a project to get down to *only* five mid-range compute platforms... 😇 #GoodTimes

Then one day the doors were locked. All those wireless companies collapsed, the tower companies, everything. Now it’s just the big 3. /goes back to reading about the endless AI companies all spending way too much money

Vicky Harp

@vickyharp.com

I was trying to tell my kid about "10-10" numbers being advertised on television and it was truly hopeless. Explaining mass market interexchange carriers to someone who has no notion of landlines, much less long distance carriers.