Sat, 07 Jun 2008

Into the sunset

I finally got around to dropping four old computers off to recycling. Triton, a community college nearby, had a recycling event where students volunteered, and so I finally got around to dropping two generations of old computers off.

Old computers, I hear you ask, well how old? Real old. The older two were from an age where the bios didn't yet boot off cdroms -- circa 1995. We had bought those in Kingston just off the Queen's campus. These were respectively a pentium 90 and a pentium 100, which still have traces on the web as miles.econ.queensu.ca (e.g. in a number of Debian changelogs) and rosebud.sps.queensu.ca which was of course Lisa's office machine and for a while the only internet address showing SPS.

The next two were purchased around 1999 in Toronto on College St just north of U of T's main St George campus. Those, an AMD k6-2 300 and a Celeron overclocked to 450 MHz (woot :) lived happily in the basement of our Toronto home, forming the first lan I built. If I recall they were initially connected using a crossed ethernet cable and a second nic to the ISP. Oh boy.

At least those latter two still boot off Knoppix. And do they ever feel slow. To think now just how many Debian packages I must have built on at least three of these over the years... And each machine must have gotten at least five decent years of usage out of them. One of the second generation computers eventually morphed into the kids play computer but even retired from that a while ago.

In any event, it was good to have them recycled, and also good to have been able to do so without paying a fee as is increasingly common. So cheers to Triton. I may be back in a few years as there are still a few computers spread across the house.

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