I just realized I’ve never physically touched any sever I’ve worked on professionally. In my career, nothing felt quite as high-tech in its moment as hands-on

I just realized I’ve never physically touched any sever I’ve worked on professionally. In my career, nothing felt quite as high-tech in its moment as hands-on mainframe operation, oddly enough. - Loading a custom removable boot drive. - actually dialing in a hex address of a boot device on a console - knowing and using command sequences to bring up and down systems with thousands of simultaneous users - using quiesce to halt a mainframe, leaving all processes intact but frozen, so major hardware components could be worked on... then all processes resumed in place - bailing somebody out of a screwup that would otherwise require hours and thousands of dollars to redo - working on technology than spans 20+ years in the same shift Best of all, I was mostly on my feet all night rather than sitting at a desk. As for subsequent realms (UNIX, PC, VAX, etc), I started before servers were banished to racks and always had hands-on access back then. It was a big improvement when we could do DOS builds using cross-compilers on Sun and then serve the binaries over PC-NFS (welcome to 1993).