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Heat dissipation and gracious distances for installation and servicing.
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Good point - all those incandescent lamps must have put out huge amounts of heat.

Similarly, the stereotypical giant plasma displays in old-school telco/ISP NOCs made for a properly toasty environment. I know one ISP in the early 2000s who had to bring in a spare datacentre aircon unit to reinforce the puny office system which was completely unable to cope by itself.

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That's because you look at it with a modern eye.

It required a lot of wires back in the day. A lot.

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