All these were taken in September 2018. These are from IBM's Almaden facility at 650 Harry Road, San Jose California. I worked there from January 2001 at least through December 2018. I spent the entire time working in essentially the same group, on the third floor of the B wing. Toward the end, I was responsible for managing the group's building space, including all of B3. office0 This is my office, B3-418. It was my office the entire time I worked at Almaden, after I had enough seniority to get a window office. Before that, I was in the interior office B3-124 (across from the air handler - very loud) and before that, a desk in B3-130. The laptop runs Windows and is connected to the monitor on the left. The middle monitor connects to a Debian computer called 'bryanterm2' which is just an X server for a lot of xterms to connect to other computers. The right monitor is attached to the IBM Netfinity tower computer (ca 2000) 'sapphire' under the bench, which serves the same purpose as 'bryanterm2', for additional screen space. I had Sapphire since I started working at Almaden. It was my primary workstation before laptops became available. The chair is a Steelcase Leap, which I got in the first few years I was there. office1 Another view of my office. You can see a package on the bench. Receiving packages like this was a large part of my job. To the left of the white board is another Netfinity computer, which I kept for spare parts for 'sapphire'. The laptop on the bench is the Tiburon loaner. office2 Another view of my office. The papers on the wall are floor plans, which represented one of my favorite jobs at IBM: space management. But by the time this picture was taken, most of these were irrelevant, as my space management job was mostly eliminated when my group was split. The paper on the cabinet is a Dilbert comic in which Wally is working and thinking, "The gifted programmer employs a rarely seen strategy of code reuse. The crowd goes wild." b3_hall This is one of the two main corridors on floor B3, seen from the end. My office is about halfway down, on the right. I don't know why the color in the photo is so bad. The carpet is a dull green. officeview This is the view from my office window. The road is the driveway from Harry Road. I spent a lot of time staring at this view and thinking. convview This is the view from the conversation area in the corner of the floor. This is the driveway coming up from Bernal Road, which I used every day. The crossroad is the perimeter road, on which I walked with coworkers after lunch most days. The telescope never worked. It was there when I got there in 2001 and eventually lost parts. I ordered a set of eyepieces for it, but for some reason, there was never anything visible through it. conv This is the conversation area in the corner of the floor (B3-260). The furniture dates to the opening of the building. The magazine rack on the right is empty. At one time, several staff members put journals in there, but when I started taking care of the floor, they were many years old and I discarded them all. confroom This is the B3-247 conference room - the public conference room on B3. This is where nearly all of our meetings took place. I had the whiteboards installed, so I could use the original whiteboards in offices. They were custom-made for offices. I also supplied the room with A/V adapters, bought the monitor remote control when the original was stolen, and reprogrammed the monitor control panel on the wall so it did not shut off the monitor after 30 minutes. core This is the utility core (room B3-990) on B3. Getting keys to the 3 lab doors that open on this core was one of my first accomplishments as space manager. We had by far the cleanest, most organized core in the building. furniture This is B3-417B, my furniture storage room. It had a couple of racks of computer equipment and a bench in it when I took it over. And it was charged to our group as a wet lab, even though it was carpeted and had any utilities removed from it long ago, probably before the current walls were in place. The carpet is dull green. trash_room This is B3-427C, which I used to store trash until I had enough to efficiently dispose of it. It is nearly full here. Before it was a trash room, it was summer intern office space and lab space. stockroom_back This is the stock room, room B3-427B. It was my greatest achievement at Almaden. I wanted to create a stock room from my earliest days in the group and even proposed it to our director Bruce Hillsberg at one point. While he said he liked the idea, I could not get my manager to allocate time for me to maintain a stock room. A few years later, I just sort of naturally adopted the space management job and in surveying all the unused space we had, decided this room would be a good stock room. At the time, it was just full of garbage, having been used for intern desk space and for Sven Oehme's lab for a while. I didn't witness most of the room's history, but it had placed to plug in computer racks. I had already started a fairly complete stock room downstairs in G1-104B, but few people knew it existed and it didn't have nearly as much selection. I kept things in carboard boxes on shelves on the wall. As soon as I had shelving in place in B3-427B, I began moving all that equipment up. I left only the oldest, museum-quality things. Before long, I was stocking hundreds of items and spending a significant amount of time just ordering and stocking things. stockroom_middle This view of the middle aisle includes the full set of video adapters in the foreground. I stocked just about any video conversion you could imagine; this is a good example of how useful this stockroom was. stockroom_front This view of the front aisle shows the collection of ethernet cables, the most persistent connector type (EIA-568 8P8C telco, CAT5e and CAT6) I dealt with after power. The shorter cables hung on the ends of the racks, while the longer ones were in the cardboard boxes. Even though our operations kept shrinking, I continued buying new ethernet cables until the end. This was mainly because I kept organizing the colors, standardizing on blue cables for the IBM network and green for the private Tiburon network. Someone before me must have focused on gray, because we had more of that than anything else. The far end of this rack contains SAS and Infiniband cables, which always went obsolete soon after we acquired them, so this was nearly unused shelf space. But there was a period when I was stocking 8088 SAS cables downstairs that I had them on order nearly continuously. stockroom_video This is a close-up of the video adapters seen in 'stockroom_middle'. Some of these connector types are: HDMI, mini-HDMI, micro-HDMI, DisplayPort, miniDisplayPort, DVI-D, DVI-I, DVI-I dual link, SVGA DE-15 Not long after this, I made the bin labels neater. shop This is the shop area of B3-427B. I stocked this with hundreds of tools for a wide array of jobs. Any time I needed a tool, for some kind of building or equipment maintenance or construction job, I added it. There was significant theft from here, especially one summer when it was an actual deliberate thief, so I kept an inventory of every tool and took inventory once a quarter and replaced what was missing. It was my intent that people would bring their work to the shop and do it here, and if they needed to work in their labs, they would stock their labs with necessary tools, including those stocked in the stockroom. But the vast majority of use of the tools was by people taking them back to their labs and offices, and quite often not bringing them back. The far end of the bench is an office area. I thought this might be used by guests, but it never happened that way. The shelves in the back are more stock room. It is mostly personal items I scavenged from abandoned labs and offices, like stuffed animals and a bottle of mouthwash, but I also bought some of this office equipment, such as the clocks and desk fans. Under the bench is a bike repair stool I got for Christmas and had no use for myself, but might have been useful in a lab, so I sold it to IBM. kitchen This is the kitchen/food area of B3-427B. At one time, there were shelves of snacks here, maintained by Raj Gandhasri, but he eventually lost interest and stopped stocking it. The most popular attraction in B3-427B by far was the bottled water, but the only reason we even put that in there was to make coffee. The drinking fountains and restrooms handled water needs just fine. But people would stop in here at the end of the day and fill up a water bottle to take home. The shelves contain cleaning supplies, including my old Royal Dirt Devil hand-held vacuum that I sold to IBM The water delivery system for the coffee maker was possibly my greatest invention. stockroom_entrance The entrance to the stock room This originally had a keypad lock on it, along with the two other doors in this alcove. I removed one, figured out how to change the combination on another, and replaced one with a badge reader. These were also among the first doors I had rekeyed to my 831 lab key. private_stockroom This was the stockroom for things that needed to be controlled. I was the only one who had access. Some of these items were reserves of things that got stolen a lot, such as batteries, things that cost a lot, spares of tools, and a inventoried scrap equipment. private_stockroom_monitors Another view of the private stockroom, showing the wall of monitors, most of which were just scrap because they were old and small. B3-427E_B This is the B row of racks in B3-427E. B3-427E was the GPFS lab, and I used it for special equipment such as disk enclosures, as opposed to just generic servers. The console rack on the right in front of the racks was my invention. The wire trays hanging from the ceiling were my work. Before that, there were trays sitting on top of the racks and trays bolted to the walls that prevented the door to B3-130 from opening. This room has its own cooling unit and evaporator (on the roof above it). It had more equipment in it than any other room on B3 when it was full. B3-427E_A This is the A row of racks in B3-427E. B3-227_racks This is Room B3-227, which I used for general purpose servers. Before I took over, this was another GPFS lab, but I intended to open it up to the whole Cloud and Synaptic Systems group. In practice, hardly anyone outside GPFS ever used it. This was once known as "Mike's lab", as it was the first one Mike maintained. While Mike eventually took over B3-427E too, B3-227 was always much more organized. This was the original GPFS lab, from when GPFS was a video product. This room was designed for watching movies, so it had soundproofing on the walls. Before my time, it contained one of the first large LCD displays, and it got stolen. The consoles were meant to go one to each rack, but I set up the one on the right as a floating cable. B3-227_bench This is one of the workbenches in B3-227. As it was Mike's only lab, he had everything in it. The cart is one of my acquisitions. It has pneumatic wheels, unlike any other cart we owned, which made it practical for rolling delicate equipment over Almaden's stone floors. The black things piled on the bench beyond the cart are blanking panels for the racks. B3-227_rack This is the rear view of a typical equipment rack in B3-227. Blue cables are for the IBM public network; Green are for the private Tiburon network. Red are for management ports (this was Mike's convention). Gray are for local networks. Black are for console switches. Orange are optical fibre channel. freight_elevator This is the freight elevator doors, in the B3 freight elevator lobby. I used this many times, moving equipment around. B3-108_conversation_area This is the conversation area at the head of B3. The chairs are original from when the building opened. The table is one I put there so I could take the more substantial table that was there before to put in the new B3-302 conference room (Larry's outer office). restroom_corridor This is the corridor at the head of B3. This is the view from just off the stairs. The restrooms are on the right. The mechanical room is on the left. The bulletin board is on the left. At the very end of the corridor, you see the B3-108 converation area. spine_floor_2 This the spine (main corridor between the wings) on the second floor. This is looking from just inside the lobby. B2 is on the right; G2 is on the left. The pictures on the walls on both sides form what I always called the Wall of Humiliation. These are pictures celebrating various classes of employees, such as IBM fellows, Distinguished Engineers, patent plateau holders, and IBM Academy members. As I describedit, "all the people IBM respects more than you." I had to walk past the Wall of Humiliation every day of my Almaden career, and it was demoralizing. spine_floor_1 This the spine (main corridor between the wings) on the first floor. This is right under the second floor picture. B1 is on the right; G1 is on the left. G1-104 is down the hallway on the left in the foreground. I traversed that ground many, many times. spine_stair.jpg This is the staircase from the first to the second floor in the spine at either the C, D, or E wing. One could also use the nearby enclosed staircase in each wing. spine_G1 This is the spine outside of the G area. This is the path to G1-400. G1-104B_door The door to G1-104B, my first lab. I was maintaining this lab for many years before my name went on the door. It was officially David Chambliss' lab during that time. I assumed responsibility for the lab when David was my manager. David never had any interest in actually managing it. Before my time, but during David's, this lab contained wire racks of white box computers. This was before 19" rack mount was common. G1-104B_row1 The first row of racks in G1-104B Though they are largely empty now, and even the equipment present is mostly unused, this was at one time a fully used space. When I first knew this lab, there was a DS8000 in place of the two foreground racks. Before I took over, the racks were not nearly this neat. There were significant gaps between them, for one thing. G1-104B_hot_aisle This is the hot aisle between the two rows of racks. Unlike a normal hot aisle, this one has cold air vents in it, reflecting the fact that is is a working lab, where people have to work behind the racks, and it would be uncomfortably hot without these vents. I had most of the tiles with the openings for power cords made in the model shop. G1-104C This is the room off of G1-104B that I used for storage - mainly of boxes. At one time, probably before G1-104 belonged to the storage group, this was an was an office for someone. There was a file cabinet that contained some of that person's files, and I made contact with him because he still worked there. I don't remember his name. The Genie Lift was one of my most important acquisitions, as it allowed me to perfom a lot of tasks by myself. I don't know how I found out these exist, because I had never seen one. I think I read about materials lifts in installation instructions for a heavy server and just looked up that term. It cost almost $2000. G1-104D This is the room off of G1-104B that houses the air cooler. The fact that the air cooler for the lab is in a separate room is representative of the cheap way this lab was constructed. The wall should have been removed. Managing air flow was difficult. One of the big changes I made was to route return air through the ceiling and keep the door closed, but I discovered much later that there is a girder right above the wall that leaves virtually no space for air to flow back to G1-104D. I have no idea what route the air took, but it arrived colder than it left! I ultimately left the door open and let most of the air return that way. There were also wire racks at the back of this room that I used for storage. In addition to this Liebert chilled-water exchange air cooler, G1-104B got house air during regular business hours. In fact, house air mixed in with the return air to the cooler. All of this made it very difficult to manage the temperature in this room. I installed a few temperature sensors to help me do this, and I manipulated a "circuit setter" valve on the chilled water line too. I always expected this ancient cooler to break down and leave us stranded, but other than occasional broken belts (both redundant belts broke at once one day) and a broken power switch that was quickly replaced with a standard circuit breaker, it never happened. G1-104B_back_corner This is the back corner, bordering G1-104D, showing lots of scrap equipment under the benches. At this time servers older than 3650M2 are under stowed under the benches in this room. There are also a few scrap servers on their way out on top of the bench. The right-hand bench contains the ethernet cable assortment. Laying them out this way so you could see their lengths was one of my earliest innovations in this lab. G1-104B_sensor Here is the temperature and air flow sensor on the house air register, connected to an IT Watchdog environmental monitor. This was part of how I finally got and kept the cooling in this room under control. tibdev3 This is tibdev3, the last remaining server in the Texas rack in G1-104B. This was my personal server for many years - an IBM x3650 M1, running Debian. I finally moved on to a faster server that was not in G1-104B as part of vacating G1-104B. The server was originally part of the Tiburon project and I didn't really intend for it to be my personal server - I thought servers could be shared in those days. I moved to tibdev3 from the older tibdev2 and one point. Before that, I used tower computers in my office. G1-104_panel These are the circuit breaker panels that feed all of G1-104. The first management I did in G1-104B (which was the first of my labs) was to manage the power and I used these panels a lot. I also used these to shut down equipment for the Memorial Day utility shutdowns for maintenance. I also had many new circuits installed. There was one more panel in G1-104B, because we filled up these two. G1-400_door This is the door from G1-602 into G1-400, the original inner sanctum of Almaden I/S. In my time, it was just the home of our performance lab. cafeteria_servery This is the entrance to the cafeteria servery. I ate here nearly every day I worked in the building. For the first few years, I had a chicken sandwich every day. Then I started having the grill special on days when the special was good. My favorite was the meatball sub, but there were many good ones. Then I switched to a turkey burger every day unless the special was especially good, because the turkey burger was less expensive. cafeteria_dining_room This is the cafeteria dining room. It was remodelled in 2017. Before that, it was better: The tables and chairs were wood to match the architecture of the building and the chairs had wraparound arms and form-fit seats, so were much more comfortable. The floor was carpeted, and the chairs slid easily, unless the ones in the picture. The uncomfortable high tables didn't exist. One thing that was bad about the orignal dining room is that most of the tables were round, so they would not combine well for large groups. But the new tables weren't great for that either, because the individual rectangular tables were mostly 3 feet square, which made people want to sit 3 feet apart when they were combined into long tables as show in the picture. singing_chairs This is the view away from the building from one of the parking lots. In the foreground you see bike lockers. I never used one. In the background are the tops of the singing chairs sculpture. There are strings at the top that vibrate in the wind and make music. There is a place to sit at the bottom, where you can listen to the music. There is trail leading to the singing chairs. entrance This is the main entrance to the building - the lobby. I came in to work nearly every day through here, after getting off the shuttle bus just out of frame to the right. In front of the lobby is a circular driveway. B3-417A This was a lab used by Paul Muench for many years. It was Larry Chiu's department's lab when he was a first line manager. The only major thing I did in this room was to put a lock on the back door, which led to B3-417B and a bunch of other rooms. B3-417A_bench When I took over space management, there was an old decomposing anti-static mat in front of this bench and rolling chairs had spread the black rubbery material all over the floor. I removed the mat and had the floor cleaned. B3-415 This is the printer/mail room. By the time this picture was taken, there was hardly any mail delivered here. Deliveries were only twice a week and only about half the floor residents even had their name on a slot. Mail should have simply been put under doors at least 10 years before this. When the building was built, this was two rooms - B3-415A and B3-415B. One was for mail and one for the 6670 printer. Some time before I got there, the wall was removed between the two (you can see the part that still remains), but the building drawings were never updated. I got Facilities Engineering to update the drawings, but could never get Space Management to update the room inventory. I asked at least 4 times over several years and just couldn't get them to do it. Bob Scott kept saying he didn't have any confirmation from Engineering that the rooms had been combined. I had a similar problem with E2-431 and E2-433. Bob combined these in the room inventory at my request, but I accidentally requested that the combined room be called E2-431 when it should have been E2-433 (because the E2-433 badge reader was the one that survived), and then I could never get him to correct it. B3-415_stockroom I created the office supply center on the back wall, removing a desk and installing these shelves and drawers. I started my office supply service in a single drawer on the left wall that some secretary way before me had established as a distribution point for a small number of things. I stocked that drawer anonymously for many years before I took it upon myself to make a full stock room. B3-247 This was our only public conference room on the floor. I acquired and installed the white boards. Before, there were two much smaller boards of the kind that are designed for offices. By replacing them, I was able to put the original boards in offices that needed them. (Many offices had only half a white board and half a bulletin board - a sign of the times when the building was built). I did the same thing for the white boards in the conversation areas - one of the ways B3 was significantly better maintained than any other floor. When they installed the monitor seen here, they programmed the control pad on the wall to turn it off after 30 minutes. I contacted the company that made the control pad and managed to get a copy of the control software, put it on a laptop and connected it and fixed that setting. I also replaced the remote control (seen on the table) when ours was stolen and put in the box of video adapters seen on the back counter. I did most of a complex project to put a camera in this room so people could attend meetings remotely, but in a typical display of mismanagement, the budget was cut off after I'd spent half the money, so the project never got finished. By the time I could get the rest of the money, interest had died. The coloring in this photograph is weird. The chairs are all charcoal gray, not at all blue. The black thing on the back counter with cables coming out is Apple TV. Eric bought that and I tried and failed to configure that and Eric or someone else ended up doing it. The other black thing on the back counter is something someone left behind. B3-249 This is the old Perseus lab. Perseus is the project I worked on for several years to develop GPFS Native RAID. That was originally intended to use the massive disk enclosure shown on the table. It is a rack-mounted unit for a very large rack. It holds 384 disk drives in 4-unit carriers that insert into both ends. The end shown is the rear, where the cooling air comes out. The cables are 3 mbps SAS cables with SFF 8088 connectors. The unit on the table behind it is its power supply. it plugs into the 3-phase IEC 60309 receptacle in the wall, which I had installed. Part of my job was operating and maintaining this enclosure. That included manually querying temperature and adjusting fan speeds. There is a Linux computer elsewhere in the lab that controls the enclosure; I ran programs on that computer to read temperatures and power up the unit and such. I was the only person who ever knew how to power this unit up and down (though I did write extensive instructions). The rack holds the servers on which we ran GNR, and originally also contained one of each other kind of enclosure that GNR could use. At the time of this photograph, the lab was completely unused. The lab had been used for the Ice Cube project before Perseus. B3-413 This was used for summer interns in the Cloud and Mobile group. It also became the storage place for museum pieces from Robert Garner's collection when he left. B3-255 This was the primary office space for interns and others in the Cloud and Mobile group who didn't qualify for a private office. There were 9 cubicles. The door in the back, which does not lock, goes to B3-407. B3-407 This was at one time a little-used conference room for Cloud and Mobile, but by this time was just used as additional seating and project space for summer interns. The door in the back, which does not lock, goes to B3-255. B3-411 This is office space for some team of visitors to the Cloud and Mobile group. This was at one time intern space for one of the departments. B3-251 This is Eric Butler's (Cloud and Mobile) machine room and storage room. At one time, it was full of servers, but now there is just one rack. B3-239_right This is the cubicle area that principally housed summer interns. I fixed it up considerably. I installed most of the white boards, at one mentor's request. I upgraded all the chairs shortly after I took this picture. I supplied monitors on all the desks and later upgraded them all to 24". I fixed some network ports and supplied proper network connections to all the cubicles. I numbered the cubicles nad had the blue cubicle number signs made and put them on the walls. Shown are cubicles 1 and 2, looking right as you enter. B3-239_left B3-239 looking left as you enter: Cubicles 9, 7, and 4. B3-235 This is the first lab I worked in, the Storage Tank lab. After that, it was used for David Pease's later projects: LTFS and BlueStore, and then briefly for Moraine (in addition to the main Moraine lab on E2). The antique computers on the table (An original Macintosh, a TRS-80, and an Osborne 1) are just there because David had recently displayed them for some summer interns. When I worked in this lab in 2001, it had tower computers under the bench with consoles on the bench. These served as Storage Tank servers and clients in the days just before we started to get rackmounted servers. Even our code repository server, Topaz, was one of those tower machines. B3-235_left The left-hand side of the room upon entering from the corridor. The drawers of the workbench in the back used to be filled with electronic parts bought in a shopping spree at Fry's a year or two before I got there, in a time when you could just go to a store, buy stuff on your corporate credit card, and get reimbursed. I cleaned out those drawers a few times, getting rid of stuff as it got obsolete. B3-235_back This is the cubby hole in the back of this L-shaped lab (it wraps around the office B3-231). When I started working at Almaden, there was a sound-absorbing cubicle-wall separating this from the main room and one or two racks of computers behind it. That rack contained the Topaz server at one point, I think still as a desktop or desk-side computer. I remember the RAID controller, which had flashing lights and gave me a sour first experience with RAID, because we lost all our data when the disk drives were fine but the RAID controller failed. The orange thing on the high shelf on the left is a volleyball (and it hadn't been there long when this picture was taken). The coiled yellow tube at the end of the bench is compressed air. It was very handy for blowing dust out of computers, which is why the people who designed this lab (early Storage Tank engineers, notably Bob Rees and Wayne Hineman) had it installed. But it was the only compressed air on the floor except in Eric Butler's lab, so was pretty useful other ways. The bicycle is David's. The primary use of this lab in its last 10 years was storing this bike. The bike is also another use of the compressed air. B3-125 This was built as a darkroom, in times that physics experiment made much us of film photography. I used it for cleanup. This was the last room on the floor I took over. For the first 15 years I worked there, this belonged to another group, which had originally used it as a darkroom, but by then was using it just for storage. I hated having that one room missing from my collection, so I eventually traded it for a room on E3 that I inherited and had no use for. I added all the cleaning equipment and materials. There was at on time (before I ever got to look in the room) an automatic film developer on the counter to the right. When I took over, there were still several boxes of film or photographic paper in the drawers, along with a few developed films showing some kind of electron pattern. B3-125_door The door to B3-125. B3-108_urinal The men's room. These urinals had automatic flushers for a few months, but they were constantly breaking and wasting water and flooding, so they took them out. B3-108 The men's room. And you can see me in the mirror taking the picture. badge My badge (sitting on my desk in my office). This was my third badge since joining IBM the second time. I first had a laminated one with a magnetic stripe. It came from the Chicago training center where I did my orientation, and looked different from those issued at Almaden. Many people assumed I didn't work there. It delaminated, so I got a new one, which was nice because it was RFID and looked like an Almaden badge. Later, there was a research project that had something to do with economics and gave me funds I could use in the cafeteria via my badge. But my badge was of an older kind and wouldn't work with the system, so I got a new one. sapphire This is the computer 'sapphire', which was my very first personal workstation at Almaden. I was still using it in 2019, though it had become a secondary workstation because it was unable to drive a 24" display. In about 2005, I started using servers in the lab to do all my computing, and Sapphire was only a terminal. I had to replace parts a few times. The computer is standing vertically on the floor. The white part is a removable carrier for a 3.5" ATA disk drive. I never removed it, but it seemed like a great way to install disk drives to me, so when I found it lying around, I used it. The disk drive was huge - 20 GiB, I think. One thing I used it for was offsite backups of my home computer. B3_keys This is one of the two rings of keys I had for all the offices on B3. Having these keys was one of my greatest accomplishments. I had to have them made by the lock shop two at a time over the course of about a year. Many of them I was able to get from the secretary's spare key set because there were redundant copies in there. Not long after I completed my set, we lost our floor secretary and I ended up the keeper of the spare keys, so these ended up not so important. I should, of course, have simply had a B3 submaster key, but IBM doesn't work that way. These were Schlage keys, with keyway 1357. jimcrow This is a joke. I found the printer room pictured with a bunch of cabinets saying "white only" and it looked like Jim Crow to me. I rounded out the joke by changing one of them to "colored" and took this picture. This was December 2021.