[vcf-midatlantic] Modem banks

[Dave McGuire]

   Ahh, very cool.  And thank you, this is good to hear.  I started that 
NOC, and ran it for its first couple of years.  Us early folks (Ed Kern, 
Matt Mosley, Mag Krokes, Bert Quattro) built the datacenter that you 
toured.  It's likely that you met one or more of us during your tour; we 
didn't allow salespeople in the NOC or the datacenter without an escort 
from engineering.

   To this day I remain embarrassed that the sales droids used all of 
that two-syllable sports crap as a sales tactic, but at least you were 
able to ignore it.  When companies start to get big and suitly, the 
sportsball types start slipping past the smell test and we end up stuck 
with them.  I'm glad we earned your business in spite of that, and I 
hope your company was pleased with the service we provided.

   I was employee #3 at Digex, and I stayed there until it started 
getting too big and suitly.  Those were great years for many of us.  We 
are all still in touch, and we all universally believe that Digex was 
the finest environment we'd ever worked in.

               -Dave

On 9/1/20 8:30 PM, Kimberley Hart via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> Way back when I had a tour of the Digex data center and NOC. We were not
> that large but I was in Baltimore for a ISP Conference and had extra time
> so I setup a meeting.  It was a nice facility. After we were done my sales
> guy asked me to hang on a second while he checked something.  As it turns
> out the box was free at Camden Yards and the Orioles were playing. So we
> grabbed anyone still at the office and free and headed on over to the
> game.  We talked nerd stuff the whole time and paid little attention to the
> game. As it turns out Ripken had just set the record for the most
> consecutive games the games before.
> 
> Needless to say we went with Digex, no because of the box sets etc... but
> because they were true heels and knew what they were doing.  Plus the boss
> liked the price.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 8:14 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <
> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 9/1/20 4:39 PM, Kimberley Hart via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>>
>>> Port master 2/e with 30 sportster modems hanging off it. That is how
>> Erol’s
>>
>>> internet started. They used the spinner racks from their video store to
>>
>>> hold them all.  I knew someone that worked there a little later, but the
>>
>>> story was passed down.
>>
>>
>>
>>     We did exactly that at Digex, we pushed those PM-2Es hard.  In the
>>
>> beginning we held the modems on rack-mounted shelves, but we had a lot
>>
>> of problems with overheating,  We initially spaced them out with Legos
>>
>> (yes, Legos!), but we quickly replaced them with custom-made metal trays
>>
>> with spacer pins as soon as we could afford to do so.
>>
>>
>>
>>     (When courting $100K+/mo contracts with datacenter tours, one must
>>
>> establish credibility and build trust...and one doesn't do that with
>> Legos.)
>>
>>
>>
>>                 -Dave
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
>>
>> New Kensington, PA
>>
>>


-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA