Reply to post: Re: You can pry the ethernet cable out of my cold dead hands!

Re: You can pry the ethernet cable out of my cold dead hands!

At one place I worked they were clearing out a room and in there was a large, grey, government surplus style metal cabinet. Inside were several racks made out of the strongest fecking square section hollow steel bars I've ever seen - very simple arrangement, front bar, back bar and joined at the far ends by crossmembers.

I said to keep that one, and I then laid all the cables over the front bar with the end level with the next bar down, laid over the gap to the back bar then back out over the next front bar going down. It was a perfect size so that most cable lengths resulted in both connectors being at the front of the cabinet next to each other. Anything longer or shorter could be accommodated using some of the spare racks. The steel was just the right roughness that the cables never slipped sideways but could be pushed to the side if needed. The edges of the steel bars were also rounded, not sharp. It took every single cable from the half-dozen mixed boxes we had. I spent a whole day filling it up, with mains at the top, printer, VGA, coaxial, serial, scsi, other weirdness in the middle and networking of various flavours at the bottom, with space on the floor for a few plastic baskets for gender-benders and other convertors and adaptors.

The cabinet must have been entropy proof. It worked beautifully for many years. Cables en masse can get VERY heavy, and these thick bars were rock solid. You could find the specific cable someone wanted in moments.

I later discovered when a former employee paid a visit that it was the cabinet they used to hang the Linotype magnetic tape cassettes in. We didn't have any of the tapes left, but apparently they weighed an absolute tonne, and there was a whole library of different typefaces, one family to a cassette. Hence the incredible strength of the cabinet!

Seems bizarre now that the entire library that was held by this bespoke metal box could easily fit ten times over on something the size of a grain of wheat now.