What’s the wildest hardware you’ve ever had to support?

Today’s young cloud architects might have no idea about the horrors of old physical hardware—often enormous, sometimes on wheels, and occasionally even featuring a little duct tape.

While many machines have shrunk quite a bit over the years and require far less of a workout to move them, the need for crafty hardware help likely remains. Market intelligence firm Gartner forecasts that IT spending is expected to increase by 9.8% from 2024 and reach $5.61 trillion in 2025. This jump includes an expected 10.4% spending spike in “devices.”

We asked IT pros to look and answer the question: What’s the wildest piece of hardware you’ve ever had to support?

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Rob Brown, director of foundation engineering, Workleap: In the back room of an old legion [community hub], where we were located, there was just a cart of very important computers that did things like replicating data and making sure that the actual data that our customers relied on inside of the data center was accurate…this whole stack of internal computers was on a rolling cart that we’d repurposed. 

Matt Radolec, VP, incident response and cloud operations, Varonis: One of the very first jobs I had was at a Penn State bridge campus called Penn State Mont Alto, and they had a backup system that would write to a tape, and then I would go and carry those tapes from one building to another…For someone that largely experienced the digital age of storage and not the physical age of storage, that would be the weirdest piece of technology for me: carrying tapes and replacing the tape and moving the tape to another building.

Pete Nicoletti, global CISO, Americas, Check Point Software Technologies: I managed a hard drive that was the size of a refrigerator. It was five megabytes. And to back it up, it used floppy disks that were the old 12-inch floppy disks. They were Single-Sided Single-Density (SSSD), which, of course, morphed down to 8″, to the 5 1⁄4″, then the 3 1⁄2″ and then today, kids wouldn’t even know what a floppy disk is.

Egon Rinderer, SVP of federal and enterprise growth, NinjaOne: This was around the time when laser printers were starting to show up in the workplace. They were still horrendously expensive, and there was a lot of training and enablement that went into teaching people how to use these strange beasts that didn’t take the perforated stacks of dot matrix paper…We answered the phone on speaker with our normal greeting, and we got this very distressed voice on the other end. [He] was oddly over enunciating his plight. He said, “My tie is caught in the printer.”

…It had gotten fully pulled in before it got caught up, and it had also gotten under the fuser and melted the tie. So we ended up cutting his tie free and getting the thing dislodged from the printer. We actually did change our enablement training after that to include, literally, “Keep loose articles of clothing away from the feed trays on the printer,” so that you don’t get them pulled in and lose a tie at best or ruin a printer at worst.

Cory Rice, VP of IT, KnowBe4: The email server was a desktop, Compaq Presario 3000. If you’ve never seen one, they’re about the size of a dorm fridge. They had the processors in there. Unlike now, where it’s the little microprocessors, these were like Nintendo cartridges. All kinds of RAM, and then a bunch of hard drives that were all connected with these giant cables. The problem was that it was too hot, because they had just come out with the Pentium IIs. So they actually had the side off of this server, so everything on the inside was exposed. There were fans that they had strategically positioned in the room to pull in the air conditioner from the vents and blow it towards the computer because it was too hot. There was a thermometer inside the bottom of the machine that we would have to go and check, once an hour, to make sure that the heat wasn’t too much. And if there was, we’d have to adjust the fans.