I worked as research staff for an OS research group at a university in the 90s. We had a new building, with a nice new machine room. However, the machine room

I worked as research staff for an OS research group at a university in the 90s. We had a new building, with a nice new machine room. However, the machine room had tightly controlled access which was limited to department IT staff only, and we wanted our grad students to have physical access to our machines. So we took over a "lab" that was never intended to host machines. By the time I left, we had 2 racks with networking gear (Myrinet and 1Gb/s ethernet, which was a big deal in the 90s), and probably 40+ 1U servers, plus several tables full of larger pedestal storage servers (one of the projects was a cluster filesystem). Just like in Rachael's story, we would have times where the HVAC would go out. I remember dragging giant 4' fans up from the basement to put in the doors of the room to cool it off during HVAC failures. Oh, and we had a fume hood too!