But the thing is, even though nobody would buy this prehistoric crap, I really don't want to throw it away. That would be such a waste. And besides, the thought just depresses me for some reason. 
As far as I know, everything works (well, will at least turn on). So what can I do with a bunch of trashy computers? Would it be possible to use them as external harddrives? The extra space would help me a lot. Also, does anybody know if it's reasonably simple to make a home webserver, and if it can be done with something that ran 95 back it its day?
Hey man, I just figured I'd post in this thread because it's relevant to my interests. I'm the guy in my town that takes any old computer anyone's trying to give away. I have about 30 ranging from 286-486 all the way up to AMD64's.
Anyway, now that I'm done with my rambling braggy part of my first post on these highly-esteemed forums, I can say that it wouldn't be very difficult (at all) to take a few hard drives, and if you have them in these computers, the IDE controllers and build some sort of server for your home.
It takes very little to run Windows 2000 server (133mhz, 64mb ram, etc) if you need to run something like that (And I know for a fact you can still pir-....buy it at computer shows for a deep discount now that Microsoft isn't supporting it anymore.) or, you can always just toss one of the smaller Linux distros on there and set it up as a file server.
The only problem with this idea is that you can't RAID on the IDE cards unless all the hard disks are the same, but if you couldn't give a flying fuck about RAID, you could just have multiple drives on it and just put different files on each drive.
A good Linux distro for this sort of thing would be Slackware if you feel like taking the time dicking around with packages to install.
I'm not sure if you can use PuppyLinux as a server OS, but I can tell you that it is fantastic as a fully-featured operating system on old hardware
Also:
http://www.puppylinux.organd
http://www.slackware.comJust saving you a google.
