Mastodawn

OTD 1992: 2nd Broadband ISDN Technical Workshop - Miyazaki, Japan.
I had the honor of giving the opening talk.
My first trip to Japan!

Tom Lyon ✅1d ago

OTD 1972: The founding of Cray Research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray

Tom Lyon ✅4d ago

OTD 1996 (30 years!) - #IpsilonNetworks takes the best of show award at the Networld+InterOp show.
My career has been pretty much downhill since then. :-)

https://web.archive.org/web/19970414155838/http://www.ipsilon.com/news/mghill-announce.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19970103020108/http://www.ipsilon.com/productinfo/datasheets/atm1600.pdf

Tom Lyon ✅6d ago

OTD 1986 (40 years!) - #SunMicrosystems "Car in Office" April Fool's Day stunt.
Recreated in 2008 at Google - but they didn't have to move and replace walls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs9FjfSv6Ss

Schmidt April Fool Cars 1986 & 2008

YouTube

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 30

OTD 1951: Census Bureau accepts the first UNIVAC system - with 59% uptime.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1434770.1434773

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 27

@Onmyom - Hi. I just finished your book Broadbandits - so many parallels to the excesses going on now with AI!

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 27

Now Meta has bumped up their $1.5B data center plan on the other side of El Paso to an insane $10B plan.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/meta-to-spend-10-billion-on-ai-data-center-in-el-paso-1gw-by-2028.html

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 27

A.I. buildout bullshit - $165B Project Jupiter outside of my hometown El Paso.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/business/boarderplex-new-mexico-data-center-mystery.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WVA.KKNk.1USqCOjUQ-hy&smid=url-share

A Data Center Wrapped in a Mystery Comes to the New Mexican Desert

As wealthier areas are pushing back against huge A.I. data centers, speculators are pitching places like Doña Ana County, N.M., on their vision. Local officials are eager for a deal — even if they don’t quite know the terms.

The New York Times

Show thread

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 25

By the way, I know Foxconn pretty well; they were the first investors in DriveScale.
I don't know any of the people mentioned in the book.
They come off in the book as financially and politically opportunistic, but the real blames lies with the politicians and the consultants surrounding them.

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 25

Good book from 2021 about how the huge public/private infrastructure deals are usually just short term gain for politicians and long term financial pain for the affected communities.

Think about all the BS AI infrastructure deals recently announced.