Back before the Raspberry Pi made hobby-class computers a norm, I had a habit of collecting old PCs and "doing things" with them. The Simtel collection was a fa

Back before the Raspberry Pi made hobby-class computers a norm, I had a habit of collecting old PCs and "doing things" with them. The Simtel collection was a favorite for finding things I didn't know I needed in my life. In the mid 2000s, a radio station near me (WFNX) broadcasted a great morning show while I was in school. I ponied up for a PATA-to-CompactFlash adapter and a 2GB CompactFlash card (probably $50 at that point), downloaded Digital SoundSystem from Simtel, hooked up an FM radio to the sound card of a Packard Bell 386, and used Digital SoundSystem (I believe from the "sound" collection) to record the radio on boot. When I got home from school, I'd unplug the card (which was hanging out the front by the ribbon cable), plug it into my computer, and listen. For most of the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was running PClock (from the "clocks" collection) on an old Dell Latitude as my alarm clock. As my then-girlfriend was unhappy with sleeping three feet from a laptop screen, I later relegated it to my mantle clock in the living room. It no longer runs PClock, but actually is still my mantle clock. At some point I was browsing through and stumbled on the APM utilities, not knowing that MS-DOS would run the CPU at full steam. Several changes to autoexec.bat's later, I probably saved a good deal off my electric bill. Good times!