The Budapest data centre had guards with AK-47s. Not ceremonial guards — working ones, in booths, with a particular quality of attention that made it clear the weapons were not decorative. The building was a converted industrial facility somewhere outside the centre of the city, not near anything you would visit otherwise, reached by a taxi whose driver had clearly made this journey before and saw no reason to discuss it. Inside: the smell of diesel generators, the cold of precision air conditioning, and a room full of equipment that hummed at a frequency that worked its way into your back teeth. I thought, at twenty-six, that this was what the internet looked like behind the curtain. I was not entirely wrong.

CityReach was an internet hotel — colocation, in the language of the era. Companies rented rack space and connectivity rather than running their own infrastructure. The dot-com boom had created an enormous appetite for this, and CityReach's business was to provide reliable, connected, cooled space to organisations that needed their servers to be somewhere with a proper power supply and a fibre connection and someone awake at 3am to reboot things. The interesting part of the job was that building those facilities required being in them, which meant travelling to where they were, which mostly meant data centres in the middle of nowhere, in cities where the nowhere was a different shape than the nowhere at home.

The cities

Berlin: an enormous building near the centre of the city, still carrying the specific atmosphere of a place that had been divided in living memory and was not yet sure what to do with reunification. The German engineers we worked with were meticulous and slightly amused by the British approach to documentation. Stockholm: cleaner than anywhere I had been, with a network team who had thought about redundancy in ways that made our own arrangements look improvised. Munich: an afternoon meeting that ran into dinner that ran into the kind of evening that expenses were invented to cover. Paris: a data centre in the outer arrondissements that was, in every practical respect, identical to the one in Manchester, except that the coffee at the nearest café was considerably better and the engineers addressed me in rapid French and then waited with polite patience while I assembled a response.

The glamour, if there was glamour, was mostly notional. The work was walking: from taxis to lobbies to server rooms to taxis again. Long corridors with strip lighting. Raised floors that flexed slightly under your feet. Cable management that told you, if you knew how to read it, the entire history of every decision that had been made and reconsidered in that room. I learned to love cable management. It is a form of archaeology.

The handset and the train

I carried an Ericsson GSM handset — slightly square-screened, solid, the kind of device that felt engineered rather than designed. Somewhere around this period the GSM network acquired a data capability: GPRS, delivered via Cellnet, slow enough that you thought carefully about what you needed to send before sending it. From trains across Europe, I managed the whole network estate on that connection. Route changes. BGP sessions that had dropped. Routing table anomalies visible only as a slight increase in latency at one particular hop.

There is something clarifying about managing a network from a train. You cannot reach the hardware. You cannot restart the process by power-cycling the box. You have to think your way through the problem using only what the protocol tells you, and then issue precise instructions to someone who can actually touch the equipment. It teaches economy. Every command has to be right. Every instruction has to be clear. The habit of being precise because imprecision has immediate consequences is one I trace directly to those GPRS sessions somewhere between Munich and the Austrian border.

The warmth underneath

The thing I remember most clearly, thirty years on, is not the data centres or the equipment or the peculiar smell of diesel that all those facilities shared. It is the people. Everywhere we went, we were met with warmth. The engineers in Berlin who insisted on showing us the river at midnight. The Stockholm team who had brought enough food to a working lunch for three times the number of people present. The Parisian café owner who, on our third visit in a week, remembered how we took our coffee. The world, in the late nineties, felt genuinely curious about itself. The internet was new enough that building it felt like a collective project, and the people building it in different countries shared a kind of provisional kinship based on having all chosen the same strange thing to do with their working lives.

I did not know, then, that the bubble would burst or that colocation would consolidate into hyperscale or that the internet hotel model would eventually give way to cloud abstractions so complete that most people who use infrastructure will never be in a room with it. I just knew that the work was interesting, the travel was absorbing, and that somewhere outside Budapest there was a building full of equipment that hummed at a frequency you felt in your chest, guarded by people with rifles, connected to everything.

A PING sent from a CityReach router in 1999 would have crossed the same physical fibres as one sent today, more or less. The distances have not changed. What has changed is that nobody rides a train across Europe to manage the routing table any more. I am not sure that is entirely progress.