I’ve been cleaning and organizing a lot in the last few weeks. My home office used to be a series of folding tables, a wire rack for computers, a stack of sorted plastic bins in the closet which hadn’t been sorted INTO in years, and a stack of moving boxes with various junk from 1-3 moves ago. Today I have a corner IKEA desk and monitor cart to replace the folding tables, all of the moving boxes have been sorted into the plastic bins, and you can actually see the carpet.

Home office desk

I threw away a lot (for example, a circa 2000 VCR; it weighed less than a pound and was nearly all plastic, I don’t remember buying it, I don’t have any VHS tapes, and no donation centers would take it), donated a file cabinet to Goodwill, and donated 8 computers and 4 old rackmount hubs/switches to New2u Computers. Basically any 686-class desktop that wasn’t currently in use got donated. (Actual conversation: “Surely you mean ‘686 or older’.” “No, I’m keeping the 586 and 486, and any non-x86 computers.”)

However, today I went to the UNR surplus sale, and walked out with a Blue & White G3 PowerMac for $5. It works fine; it has no OS, but as soon as I got home I booted a dev build of Finnix running Linux 3.0-rc4. It even has a Zip drive.

So my desktop collection is currently:

  1. Athlon64 3400+ system (Linux router)
  2. Core 2 Duo E6550 system (Linux workstation)
  3. Core 2 Quad Q9300 system (Windows gaming machine)
  4. Core 2 Duo E7200 system (Finnix x86 dev)
  5. AMD K6 586-class system
  6. Cyrix 486-DX2 system
  7. Mac Mini G4 (Finnix PowerPC dev)
  8. PowerMac G4 MDD (Windtunnel)
  9. PowerMac G3 Blue & White
  10. PowerMac G3 Beige tower
  11. PowerMac G3 Beige server
  12. Linksys NSLU2
  13. Sun Ultra1
  14. Sun Blade 100
  15. SGI Challenge S
  16. Cobalt RaQ 2