Old computers

[Stainless_Steel_Rat]

Here's the situation. The company I work for has a BUNCH of old computers. I'm talking old 133Mhz-200Mhz. I have no idea what I should do with them. You're not supposed to just throw them away becuase of all the crap in them (I know monitors have lead in them, and I've heard that all the boards aren't supposed to go into landfills.)

What should I do with them? I've already pieced together a web server from the last batch I had. Are there charieties that want old systems like these? Should I take up welding and make not-so-modern art? I've thought about hooking them all up and making a Knoppix cluster server... but 10 x 200mhz doesn't seem like much of a "super"computer.

Anyways, just interested in what you all have to say...

SSR

[evildave]

I don't know. I discovered that the schools never want them. Maybe advertise?

[SRW]

The Company I worked for before used to pack them all up and ship them to a re-cycler. I think there are some places in San Jose that will recycle them for you. I was able to donate 20 or so to the Red Cross they are usually looking for them.

[teddygrahams]

M.A.M.E!

[ShowMe]

http://www.ipcop.org

Great program. Toss a second $5 internet card in those puppies and you have an instant firewall.

Make an account on ebay. Sell them.

[rockoon]

Send a few to me.

[evildave]

There seem to be a few orgs that recycle computers.

http://www.google.com/search?q=computer+recycling

[Zep]

There should be heaps of aid for the disabled places in the USA who would take good working computers. Also, plenty of volunteer and community organisations. Not to mention local sporting and activity clubs.

For example, this is one a volunteer organisation in Australia that recycles them, modified for each person's requirements: http://www.technicalaidnsw.org.au/service/cmpLoan.html

[DaveW]

GE Elfun program refurbishes computers for disadvantaged schools. Not sure how convenient it would be for you, but here is a link:

http://www.techsoup.org/resources/index.cfm?action=resource.view_full&resource_id=179&resourcelist_id=144&start=176&mar=1

[scribble]

A) I could use a couple.

B) LAst time I was in charge of something like this at work, I took all the old PCs, put them on a table out of the way, and had an auction. It made a grand total of $27 and change for my company.

Heheh

[Theodore Kurita]

This is a worthy Cause.

The BeoWulf Cluster Based Stone Soup Super Computer:

http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/


These people love getting their hands on new PC's to expand the cluster.

[Uh_Clem]

In case anyone was puzzled by teddygrahams post:

MAME= Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

http://www.mame.net/ -Joust, Burgertime, Space Invaders, etc. Sooooo many hours and soooo many quarters spent for something that now fits on a floppy.

My friends and I used to take all our old systems to computer shows and sell them in the parking lot. I haven't been to one in a while so I'm not sure if people would still buy them.

[Skyknight]

A really cheap way is to turn them into a hardware firewall.

Install a second NIC and throw Linux on it. Of course it needs to be properly configured, but it works and it's super cheap.

[iain]

An operating system like OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/) will work fine on a PC of that speed and can act as a firewall, webserver, fileserver or print server (not to mention pretty much anything else).

I'd take them but I've already got 5 PCs and a laptop (none running Windows), with a rather large IBM computer due to arrive on Wednesday so I don't think my wife would be very impressed if even more turned up :(

I'm thinking of getting a cheap rack to put my computers into. Right now they are just piled up, which works fine until I have to replace a part in the bottom one.

Edited to add : You could sell them as a job lot or individually on eBay.

[homer]

You think you've got problems ! I've got an 8 bit 6502 based system with 8 K of memory . It's 25 years old so maybe it'll do for a museum ! It still runs 'Life' quicker than a modern pentium and as for space invaders .....

[evildave]

There are two laws at work to explain your 6502 problem.

Moore's law states that the amount of stuff that can go onto a chip doubles about every 12 months.

Parkinson's law of data states that "Data expands to fill the space available for storage".

Similarly the faster the CPU, the slower and bloatier the code people write, and the more web bandwidth available, the fatter the garbage people try to push through it.

Basically, in a multitasking GUI environment, all the cycles that could be going toward making the simulation work faster are instead making the simulation prettier and more user friendly "for you". It's very difficult to get 100% of the computer's resources dedicated to anything. You might want to be playing MP3's. You get your life sim running, open up the task manager, and 99.93% of the CPU time is spent in the 'idle' thread, keeping the CPU cool. Generally most of the life simulations you have access to on the web are running in a JAVA interpreter and not optimally written, just so it can drag its feet more.

If you booted a single-task OS, wrote optimized code and rendered your 'life' sim into console mode, I guarantee that 'max' would flood fill all available simulation memory before you could react.

added...

And actually, MAME does a good job with 'Space Invaders', but it also follows the model I've already described. MAME is emulating the hardware that used to natively run the Space Invaders game. Every CPU opcode is interpreted in C code that isn't all that great on every CPU it could run on when you analyze what comes out of it. Once again, most of the time in MAME is spent WAITING, else on most machines the space invaders game would be over before you began it. MAME used to be a console app, but WinMAME and similar permutations have appeared to displace it for most people. Definitely WinMAME gets more cycles than under a windows DOS box that tends to emulate a 486-33, even on a 3000MHz P4 machine, but once again the OS keeps the lion's share of resources, in case you want to do something else while playing space invaders.

[Captain_Snort]

There are many places that will take old computers and recondition them and give them to schools in Africa or other places so we can have more 419 scammers.

No seriously, donate them to an educational charity, engrave on the cases 'donated by XYZ company' good PR.

[Oleron]

I had this problem recently, where I had a load of old pentium 75 -100 vintage machines.

Thinking I was doing my bit for the environment I phoned my local council to ask if there was a safe disposal method for these old timers.
The guy on the phone told me to gather them all up and bung them in the nearest skip! When I asked about pollution and heavy metals he just said that the European regulations hadn't come into effect yet and to dump as much as I could before they were introduced.

Before I ditched them I removed (and smashed to bits - great stress buster!) the hard drives. You don't want some clever-dick nicking all your companies secrets. I also took out any components worth keeping as spares - cd-roms, memory, network cards etc.

[Zep]

You think you've got problems!

My computer museum has some 150 tonnes of old computers to ditch, and nary a PC amongst them they are so old. And that's not all the stuff that we have!

Metal recyclers is the answer.

[Stainless_Steel_Rat]

Thanks for all the advice everyone. Now I get to shop around and see what's available in my area, and what my bosses decide. With my luck my office will just keep getting smaller, and smaller.

I'm beging to think I could just build a small house with them :)

SSR

[homer]

I was interested in that piece about the stone soup group . Aren't they the chaps that wrote the VERY fast fractal generator ? I still can find new things with this after 4 years .

[Solitaire]

Build a time machine that reaches back about ten years ago and give
them to your former self who will be thrilled to get free used hardware.
Works for me.

[Smike]

I go for the modern art