As I wrote in my article The Death of the Yellow Pages, "In 1994 my company was in the business of designing interactive telephone systems for large corporate customers like American Express and United Airlines." We started with one computer and 24 phone lines.

Two years later the ubiquity of the Internet forced us to drop that business and enter the prepaid phonecard business - by 2003 we had hundreds of computers connected to more than 24,000 phone lines (see Verizon Union - Fraudsters and Extortionists) servicing more than half a million customers a day (see Communications Non-Workers of America are Worthless Idiots).

By 2009 we had overloaded the electrical and cooling capacity of the building that housed our headquarters on Varick Street in lower Manhattan forcing us to move a few dozen racks of equipment (each rack holding from half a dozen computers to more than a dozen DS3 routers, multiplexers and other network gear) to 60 Hudson Street, formerly known as the Western Union Building, arguably the most important colocation centre in the world.

Here are two photos of some of our racks at 60 Hudson:

When the computers were only a minute away from my desk, I would visit them each day, putting my hand near the fans, stroking the power lines, touching the front panels, looking for warning lights and in general just being friendly with my machines.

When the equipment was moved more than half a mile away, I visited my babies perhaps once every few months. The procedure to get to them involved too many visitor passes and too many doors to go through.