Friends and co-workers
have brought this up many times in the past, why would I ever buy used and
obsolete hardware when you can find reasonably priced modern hardware on the
market?
While this is fine,
and I have nothing against it I have a predilection for old hardware that can
be put back to effective use for two very specific reasons, one is Linux and
the other one is a man by the name of K. Mandla.
Back when I
started getting into Linux, some 10 years ago, I was struggling yet was always
fascinated by the level of control you had over your operating system, want to
install some software? It’s probably in a repository, don’t need a GUI? That’s
fine, run it through the command line, and on the command line is where I found
myself more intrigued, this all mighty black screen held so much control over
everything, an esoteric world in front of me that I could not wait to tamper
with, every mistake was a lesson well learned, every success was a thrill, but
to learn that you could run video and audio directly from the console was
something that completely changed the way I saw computers coming from a purely
Windows environment.
When looking for
more things to do I hit a blog of someone named K. Mandla and there my love for
the console grew but furthermore my appreciation for old hardware and the
possibilities of what I could do with it, repurposing it to do very specific
tasks, I got into it so much that I went to flea markets and PC stores to pick
up old hardware, in most cases I could get it for free because the owners just
wanted to get rid of all the trash they had because they could not push it into
the market, I was rebuilding old PCs and selling them for 10 or 20 dollars back
then, whatever happened to those computers I would not know but at least I
managed to rescue them from the garbage dump and gave the opportunity to a lot
of people of finally having a computer back when having a smart phone was
either having an iPhone or a Blackberry, either option was expensive so a cheap
computer, no matter how slow or short lived, was a viable exit.
While I am conscious
that also using old hardware may mean higher electrical bills and this is in no
way helping the planet or my wallet there is a very important issue with
e-waste being dropped on Africa and Asia, the link contains a very informative
overview on what is going in Ghana and e-waste literally killing the country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
There is another
point aside from repurposing or saving the planet, one way or the other as this
is again very debatable, and that is collecting some old hardware that I had
worked with, that was very reliable and apparently very long lasting, an
example of this being the IBM T60, T61 and T400 laptops I have at home which I
continue to use even to this day with Debian as they are more than enough for
what I need to do, the T60 and T61 are stored but these I have used for 8 and 7
years respectively and the only reason why I stopped using them was because I
could not put 4GB of RAM in them yet I could see some tasks that I could use
these laptops for, then there’s the Pentium III Laptop that I use to write and
play old videogames, because emulation is fine but sometimes I just doesn’t
work and writing without any interruptions can be golden when trying to put
every ounce of effort into it.
Also there’s trying
out old hardware that I had never worked with in the past such as SCSI drives,
this was more of an accident actually as I did not read on the specs of the
PowerEdge 1850 on what type of hard drives it used but at the price of 30
dollars with shipping included I could not pass it up and the hard drives, two
136GB and one 73GB, ended up costing 20 dollars with shipping, or DAT Tapes, which
I actually worked for some time with but I never got the chance to do it myself
and while backing up something on another hard drive or the cloud is fine I
could always have a spare backup for emergencies on a tape.
And to add to
the inventory I have recently purchased a SunFire v100 and SunFire v120, one of
them is IDE and the other one is SCSI so I do not have a problem with getting
them to work, they already have RAM and everything on them it’s just a matter
of connecting through a DB9 to Ethernet type cable to the console of these
servers to get them to boot onto a CD, which I still have plenty laying around
surprisingly, and install an operating system so I can fiddle around with them,
probably to make a small web server or even a firewall/proxy, we’ll see about
that one but this was all because I wanted to play around with these old
machines as I’ve read about them and have been intrigued about how good they
are.
Now the only
problem that I have left is buying a server rack and start building up a room to
put the servers and all the retro-hardware that is just piling up.
