429 Castro computer room.

These pictures were taken shortly before we moved almost everything to our Middlefield facilities. Previous to having the machines in the 429 room, everything was in the little office on 421. The original Best machines were (as far as I can recall): mac.best.com, a 486 DX2-66 router/DNS machine, shell.best.com, a pentium 90 web/shell/mail server, and news.best.com, a 486 with a full heigh 9 GB drive.

In this first picture, you can see shell1 serving customer mail and shell service, red, serving web pages, shell2, and news1. Next to them is console.best.com, Rich's Sparc1. Console was originally used to create many account, as well as kick campers from our modem dialup pools. In addition, it served radius files and as a backup site. console is still in use today at best, as an internal employee machine.

In this picture, also of 429 castro, you can see more of our dialin modems and some networking equipment. Towards the left you can see my first attempt at a network topology map. (It's still on the whiteboard at 429 today!) At this point in time, early August 95, we had 3 POPs with T1s, an MCI T1 and a Net99 T1. Also, we had three frame relay customers on the Engage router towards the left.

While we had "invented" the famous modem racks by this time, all of the modems here on the wall were already in place and we were too busy to move them. The modems here also each had power strips rather than the parallel system we use today. Everything was still located on *one* ethernet segment. The collision light would typically be solid for 20 hours a day.

Here is a shot from a different angle. In the foreground, you can see blob.best.net. This was the original "admin" machine. The name was thought up by Matt. Blame him. Next to blob you can see a modem hanging out from a case where we would put the overflow after running out of wall space.

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