Back in the 90s, I recall something similar. Due to cost of hardware, networking wasn't as hi-tech as it is now. So it would be common for medium sized office b

Back in the 90s, I recall something similar. Due to cost of hardware, networking wasn't as hi-tech as it is now. So it would be common for medium sized office buildings to have CAT3/5 cables trunked from everywhere in the building down to a central patch room, in which there would be 1000s of patch ports and patch cables stringing everywhere into discrete hubs that had no-onboard management. To trace a connection you'd have to start with the wall or floor port number that the end device was plugged into, and hope it's mapped correctly to a patch panel/port number in the patch room, and then manually trace any patch cable from there onwards to the hub etc. The whole system falls apart when you have no idea where in the building the end device is, if you are lucky there may be a managed switch on the network route somewhere that may help you narrow down the location somewhat. So yes, it did happen sometimes that the only way to find a box was to send a desktop alert and hope the admin of that box contacted you.