he, reminds me of coding up a bbs, or using the main players (MBBS/wildcat) and cramming as many modems into a box as i could get assigned by irq.
i miss this application called telix.. it ( a term emulator) had this great language called SALT you could do a lot of telcom stuff with before the interwebs. the salt manual was one of the first programming books i purchased.
ive got a few of these old servers lying around with dozens/hundreds of GBs of ram.. but my kids dont give a shit. i think it skips a generation.
those machines are kind of expensive to run 24/7. electricity for me is not cheap.