Yeah, it’s easy to forget how hard the Second Law works against you when someone else is taking care of it for you. It’s like how some developers today don’t realize what it was like to run a web service before AWS. I once lost a box and had to drive down to the data center and found that the fan bearing had blown. But it was an expensive hardware firewall from eBay and I couldn’t easily get another. So I had to go out and buy a new generic fan at Micro Center. Except it didn’t fit so I had to then go buy a file at ACE hardware and file down the fan until it fit. And I had to epoxy it down.

Of course back then a half day of unplanned downtime warranted a phone call to your big customers but wasn’t really a dealbreaker.