[geeks] Data Center Braggage

[Bill Bradford]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 10:08:27AM -0500, Benjamin Kelley wrote:
> They were too poor to afford rackmount modems.
> So they took the boards out of USR sportsters and mounted them in a
> makeshift case.  

Hey now, when I worked at Texas.Net, before the shift to lines-coming-in-on-
PRI, we actually designed and *sold as a product*, a rackmount chassis and
power supply meant to hold (8?  I cant remember) USR Courier circuit boards.

(remove the outer black plastic shell, and you've got one entirely
 self-contained modem on a PC board with some red LEDs on the front..)

Instead of running 8 power supplies, you'd have one cable for the 
chassis, and run short plugs from the back of each PC board to the power supply
in the bottom of the chassis.  Of course, you still had to deal with the 
hydra serial cables, but those werent too bad, and we were anal about cable
organization and labeling.

Was one of the coolest sights I'd ever seen, the first time I saw four full
racks of these beasts (with Portmaster 2Es) in the dark - it was very
WarGames/Connection-Machine-ish, a couple thousand red LEDs...

The heat these put off was impressive, too... 8-)  

We were SO glad to go to digital modems, but man, they didnt have the
same blinky-light factor at all.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX