What to Do with the Space

This tickles my funny bone.

"What to Do with the Space...the real estate freed by the shrinking of semiconductor circuits."

My first read gave me the impression the article was talking about real estate freed up as the result of semiconductors on the building level rather than the chip level.

Perhaps that was so because here in the Atlanta area, some years ago when I was working for a company that serviced standby power generators for the phone company, we pulled up one day in front of a central switching office. When we walked in we were confronted by guys swinging sledge hammers and bashing out of the equipment racks the last generation of cross-bar switching equipment.

I had many years ago in the long lines office in Los Angeles, been one of the installers of the first generation of cross-bar. Now they were bashing it and carrying it out and tossing it in junk trucks.

What did they replace it with? Walking further in, new racks covering about a quarter of that floors space, was the solid state switching racks.

Now you are writing about what to do with the real estate left on the chip with the reduction in circuit size.

I wonder what has been done with the huge amounts of phone company building real estate all over the country freed up by solid state.

That might make an interesting article.

j.