bmajik's Journal: What do you do with hardware you can't give up?

Growing up, I was a big fan of workstation class machines. This persisted all through highschool and college, and for a while, a bit afterwards.

For instance, I left highschool with a Sparc IPX and a Sparc 10, but no car. Goofy priorities, I guess. When I was in school I picked up an SGI I^2 High Impact. I outfitted my SS10 with dual SunVideo cards, a dual-proc upgrade, a couple different framebuffers (TGX, ZX, etc).

The Math Department of my school auctioned its entire remaining inventory of NeXT workstations -- which I bought in its entirety. In addition, I picked up a color Turbo, an NCD X-Terminal, a few VT100 clones, etc.

Now, I've moved a lot since then. I sold my SS IPX to get some other hardware. I gave my SGI machine to a friend that had never used SGIs or IRIX before. I sold my Color Turbo to a guy who might make better use of it. The X-term ended up with a friend I think.

I divested half of my NeXT lab -- including the monitors -- to people that wanted to play with them. I have 3 non-functioning 030 cubes left, and with a sheet of plain glass, they make up one of my coffee tables. I also have my SS10, which I cannot let myself get rid of because of all the money I dumped into it.

I've made my peace with using the remaining NeXT cubes as furnture. I'm not sure what to do with the SS10 - it uses a lot of power, it's very loud, and I can't think of much interesting to do with it. It's utterly worthless on ebay.

I think I still have my Apple ][+ somewhere. It's the machine I learned to program on.... :)

What do you do with old computers that are "special", but that you don't have a computing need for?