The Irresistable Appeal of Legacy & Refurbished Hardware
By Prem on May 3, 2019
I used to collect old computers when I was in Europe. The very first one was a Sun Blade 1000. Our research facility experienced a growth spurt then and our senior Sysadmin felt that scaling our UNIX server and computing lab would cost a fortune. He advised the boss to replace it with a much cheaper, more hands on DIY Linux server to handle all our needs. Talk about cost cutting and every boss will start drooling, and so did ours as well. Our computing lab’s entire Sun Blade fleet suddenly felt obsolete and was off to the chopping block when I requested our Sysadmin to give me at least one machine. He gave 7! I had a small accommodation back then and hence, couldn’t afford all of them. Took a couple of them home and set them up in my cellar and they stayed with me until I left Europe. I ran NetBSD on one of them and OpenBSD on another. Monstrous piece of hardware and I really loved them.
The passion for making old things work took a turn for the worst after a while though. I would go on these hunts on the weekends in my neighborhood looking for computers people might have thrown in the trash. Seeing a brown ass man with long hair rummaging through your trash is certainly not a good sign. Given the current climate in Europe, I am sure I would get shot in my ass. Fortunately, a few of them knew me then already, so they didn’t bother too much. I have found Toshiba Satellite’s, Tecra’s, IBM Thinkpads, Samsung Aura’s, you name it. I would clean them properly, upgrade their specs (RAM, swap out hard disks, BIOS upgrades etc.) and put any of the BSD’s (Trust me folks, it is no joke! NetBSD runs on anything!). It was a lot of fun. At one point, the situation got so out of control that I had more than 30 computers! Not to mention the electricity bill and a grumpy old house owner! Sanity prevailed though, and I ended up donating the desktops to a local charity house and the laptops to underprivileged college going kids. This was one of my proudest moments.
Here are a few screens from sometime back!
Here’s a screenshot of NetBSD 5.1 running on an old Dell Latitude salvaged from trash.
