Post

Sup bitches You old

How to explain to the youngest generation the time of 65 wireless providers in the US, not 3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The first time I ever saw a hit swappable RAID array was in an MCI office tower in Houston. I later heard some of the equipment from that office was taken home by employees after they didn't get paid during one of the accounting scandals.