Walked into a server room from 1999 yesterday

Helped a client clean out an old office building and found a locked closet full of Compaq servers and a 3Com hub still blinking. The cables were a mess of thick coax and ancient SCSI chains. Anyone else run into old setups like this still running?

3 comments

3 Comments

faith_thomas28d ago

Thicknet vampire taps" yeah that's a phrase I haven't heard in forever. Idk how that stuff is still running honestly.

tylerj2228d ago

I was reading this article the other day about how some hospitals still run on Windows NT and old server hardware because their medical software literally can't be upgraded without some huge expensive overhaul. So seeing that Compaq stuff still blinking honestly doesn't surprise me one bit. The coax cabling is what gets me though, I remember trying to terminate those thicknet vampire taps back in the day and it was a nightmare. Bet that closet smelled like ozone and stale coffee if it was anything like the ones I've seen.

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carter.casey28d ago

The vampire tap thing brings back a memory of my old boss who used to tell stories about crawling through ceiling tiles in a 1980s bank just to tap into the backbone, always said it was like performing surgery on a live network. He swore by using a multimeter to check signal strength before clamping down, but half the time it was just blind luck if it worked.