Re: Old Computers

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

Michael Edmiston wrote:
> A confession and an interesting story...
>
> When we "demoted" a bunch of 486 computers, we couldn't bear to throw them
> out, so we kept about 30 of them.  A year later we hadn't touched them, but
> we demoted 25 or so Pentium-75's.  We threw out the 486 and kept the P-75's.
> A year later we demoted 25 or 30 Pentium-133's.  We threw the P-75's out of
> storage and stored the P-133's.  This happened again.  Today we have P-233's
> in storage and are beginning to demote P-333's.  We will probably clean out
> the storage room of P-233's and put the old P-333's there.  We haven't
> learned our lesson yet.

To much of the world this sounds like a great set of computers.  I'm
still running computers as old as a 66 MHz 486 running Windows 3.1.  For
what we use it for its fine - the only thing is you have to resist the
temptation to kill a perfectly functional computer by "upgrading".  For
those who honestly cannot find uses for older computers, does this sound
familiar?

"Here at the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at the University of
Minnesota, we inherited a number of old IBM PS/Valuepoint 486 machines
(16 Meg memory, 200 Meg HD) with keyboards and monitors, and were trying
to find a way to get some good
use out of them."

If that sounds like you, the page I pulled it off is
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue27/kaszeta.html

If nothing else, these work great as XTerminals, network print servers,
firewalls etc.  For those not familiar with Linux, you can scale back
how much operating system you install and only put in the parts you
need.  So you can put together a desktop system comparable to whatever
you use right now, or make up specialized small "distros" for particular
tasks such as above.  Aside from a bit of time educating yourself, its
free too.

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html