Collecting and using old computers can be an expensive and space-intensive hobby.

The newcomers are constantly trying to find the next machine to add to the collection.

The older guys are often trying to offload equipment to reclaim space, or downsize a collection they spent years putting together. After all, there's only so much time to play with these things.

I'm one of the latter. I basically have all the machines I can handle for a while, and lots of unused "stuff" lying around. I'm not one of those who has one or more storage spaces full of equipment, but most of the rooms in my house have old computer gear gathering dust.

It's not pretty.

So I'm getting rid of a bunch of old things. I've got old x86 computers, a 3B2/400, lots of accessories, boards, disks, cables, and other assorted stuff that has to go before I have a general family rebellion on my hands. I've got new-in-the-box MS software that is probably of interest to some (I'm not much of an MS kind of guy).

Some of it is just going in the trash, some of it will be given away, and some sold.

So what made me buy a not-old-enough PowerMac G5 last week? Well I'm not entirely sure, but I think it might be something about having those top of the line machines that I never could afford when they were new.

Examples:

  • I have an AT&T 3B2/600G with many accessories and software packages that would have cost well over $100K when new.
  • I have a tricked out Mac Quadra 800 running A/UX that was very expensive in its day.
  • I have a very nice Sun Sparc 20 with all the extras running SunOS.
  • I have a Compaq P1 running SVR4.2MP.

And now I have a PowerMac G5. This machine has dual 2.7GHz G5 processors, 6GB of RAM, and 2TB of SATA configured as a 1TB mirrored RAID set. I purchased the machine for $100, but it came without disk drives, so I added two 1TB SATA drives at $42 each. Quite a machine for under $200, and a tribute to the Steve Jobs' vision and design sense. The machine looks like it was carved out of a single block of aluminum. It is destined to be a classic.

I've configured it with the latest OS that supported the G5: OS X 10.5 Leopard, a strong OS that runs perfectly on this machine.

So the final question is "what can or should I do with this machine?" I'm not perfectly sure of the answer, but I'm thinking it has something to do with music, photos, videos, and historic computing documents. And webdav.

Maybe a cross between a streaming media server, a document server, and a workstation. Something that can take advantage of the storage I've given it and the strengths of OS X.

I'll be configuring the webdav server in the next couple of days.