Akihabara

Few people know there used to be a data center inside a building connected directly to Akihabara station.

It's gone now. Even back then, most people didn't know an IDC existed in a place like that. There was a resident admin. A textbook geek, sitting at a desk buried in cables and equipment. One night I was setting up a router and got stuck—no crossover cable. Step outside and you could buy one. This was Akihabara. But it was the middle of the night. The admin lent me one. The cable had a label on it that read "kurou-su"—a pun on "cross" that also means "to suffer." It felt about right.

The biggest advantage of an IDC in Akihabara may have been that you could procure parts on foot. As long as it wasn't the middle of the night.

Akihabara changed. There was a time it was an electronics parts district. Shops lined the streets selling loose resistors and capacitors. Then it became a PC parts town. Then games and anime. Then maid cafés. Now it's a tourist destination.

I liked the junk shops. Circuit boards with no clear purpose. CPUs pulled from dead machines. Used hard drives that may or may not spin up. Digging through the shelves felt like a treasure hunt. That's where I found an Enterprise 10000. The junk shops still exist, but fewer of them.

I wonder what happened to that IDC admin. The data center is gone. Akihabara changed. Nobody uses crossover cables anymore. But I remember that late-night kindness.