4/12/2005: A piece of Philadelphia ISP history

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The current photo would be pretty boring... just a bunch of equipment in a rack, and hardly any blinky lights, even. The idea is that most of this kind of equipment should be boring: you set it up in the back room and if you're lucky it runs for 5 years without any hardware worries.

Appreciate how much maintainence was necessary for all those computer control panels with lights. Those lights would burn out in as quick as every three months. Constantly replacing light bulbs. Remember that computer on the TV show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea"? What a maintenance nightmare - all those little bulbs that had to be constantly replaced - if it was a real computer.

All those bulbs first replaced with LEDs at about $10 per bulb. Then we moved all that information to a screen. It no longer looks impressive. But the screen that replaced those big impressive panels report so much more useful information.

Incidentally, one problem in Three Mile Island was how events were reported. The DEC spooler was something like three hours behind in reporting events on the printer. Computers back then were not expected to have to report so much so fast.