[Techtalk] What do you do with old computers?

[Rebecca J. Walter]

On Sat, 2002-01-26 at 10:46, Sonja Krause-Harder wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 11:04:16PM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> 
> > That will be very tight (540 MB). But you can do it. You may need to
> 
> I just remembered my first home-build unixoid, a MacII with 4MB RAM
> and 80MB HD. I put NetBSD on it, and it could boot _and_ run perl.
> (Hey, that was something to be proud of! ;))
> There was no space for anything else on the disk, and after some
> playing around and admiring My First Commandline, it has been waiting
> for a larger HD to happen, which never did.
> 
> Now, this machine was old when I did this, but now it is ancient :)
> Nevertheless, it is a working computer, so I can't just throw it out.
> (I have trouble getting rid of broken ones, though I'm pretty much
> clueless with hardware). Do you also have oldies like that at home,
> and do you use them for anything?

We used to have a whole room filled with broken and less-broken odds and
ends of computers.  My husband finally threw most of it out when the
floor started sagging and I convinced him we needed a closet.  But some
old hardware can be converted into terminals.  Right now my husband is
trying to build an xterminal out of an older machine by serving a kernel
to it over dhcp.