[old_tv_nut]

Thanks - "raceways" was the term I couldn't remember.
General offices at first had only phone and electric, I think, but lab areas had tons of coax cable. The coax came from a central "signal studio." Feeds consisted of a fixed RF channel bank of test signals and a variable channel bank, where you could call the studio and request special signals. [EDIT: there was a third bank of off-air signals.] Plus, there were multiple individual cables for baseband video that would be supplied on request. The coax all ran from the studio through the floor to patch panel racks spaced throughout the labs, and then from the patch panels through the floor to individual work benches.

We said that the studio techs' motto was "It's OK on this end."

I once had a back and forth run of mild practical jokes with one of the engineers who worked on sweep circuits, who always had a set running with the Indian Head test pattern. The jokes involved a picture of me with googly doll eyes pasted on. We would alternately hide the picture somewhere in the other's work space. He gave up trying to best me when I had the studio substitute a test pattern with my googly-eyed face staring out at him in place of the Indian.