In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with. It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail,

In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with. It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail, handling IRC, serving web pages, and whatever else a few of us wanted from it. The performance was fine. (The Pentium-ish machines stayed on desktop duty where GUIs devoured resources.)