I was thinking of odd experiences I had in the '90s and early 2000s.

There was no cloud back then, most everything was housed in rented
co-location facilities. You either shared an open rack with other
tenants or splurged on a locking half or full rack. 365Main was a
facility in San Francisco that was close to most of SOMA, the epicenter
of the first dot-com boom.

I worked at one company and migrated from the shared open rack to a
locking half-rack. I left that company to go work for a startup that had
just gotten their angel round of funding. They signed up for the cheaper
shared rack. I went into the colo facility to set up their web server,
and had a sense of deja vu - it was the same cage and the same shared
rack. The cable hanging from the port I was allocated has the name of my
old company taped to it.

Later on, I started consulting. One of the companies I worked with was
in Marin county, and we partnered with the only colo facility in town. I
spent way too much time trying to get shelves to fit in their slightly
odd racks, and spent a couple of hours nursing a crashed server.

A couple of years later was working with a client located at 365Main. I
noticed the same oddball racks with the shelving bodged into the rack,
looked up at the top of the rack and saw an asset tag belonging to the
company in Marin County! They'd gone out of business and 365 bought
their kit. I wondered if that was the same rack that I'd messed up
trying to get the shelving in years earlier!



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