I hit the jackpot in 1999, when I was interning at a small brokerage in London as an IT gopher - the outfit a few floors below us had gone bust, and had just le

I hit the jackpot in 1999, when I was interning at a small brokerage in London as an IT gopher - the outfit a few floors below us had gone bust, and had just left their offices wide open, hardware heaped up for disposal. A coworker and I quickly whipped up an e-waste disposal flier, stuck it to their door, and lo and behold they were all too happy to have us take away all of their hardware for no charge. A lot of it went on eBay after being scrubbed, as I had rent to pay, but I ended up with a stack of sparcstations, an ultra 1, a few sgi machines and a bunch of decstations. I ended up selling the big sun servers (can’t remember models - one was about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90’s Star Trek prop and the other was a full cabinet, and oh god they were noisy), but had a fascinating time setting them up and tinkering with them at home, and it was where I really first got to grips with unix sysadmin. Set myself up a small renderfarm, as I was dicking around with CG at the time, and later used a hodgepodge of machines to run simulations for my dissertation. I ultimately ended up repurposing the sparcstations into hysteresis testing stations and sold them to a pipeline company through the university. The rest, I still have, and when I have space (and power - I live off grid these days), I absolutely intend to burn many watts to have some fun reminiscing with long-past state-of-the-art hardware.