My Old Computers

My old computers

I haven’t really kept track of the computers I’ve used over the years. A summarized list is below - I may not have the exact model in a couple of cases, but what’s listed is pretty close. Between 1998 and 2004, my friends and I acquired an assortment of parts, traded them, and built our own (obsolete) computers from a pile of parts.

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~1996: Commodore PC Compatible. Ran MS-DOS. Played basic games, joined BBS.
1996-2000: Packard Bell Pentium II 133MHz. Hung out on a BBS, Played games like Duke Nukem 3D and Sim City 2000. Windows 95, 98, 2000. Later installed Red Hat Linux 5.2, bought off a shelf at a Wal-Mart, and tested other Linux distributions.
1997-1999: Zenith SupersPort 286. Mostly used MS-DOS and kept a journal on it. Windows 3.0 installed. Learned some BASIC on this.
1997-2006: Several no-name 386 and 486s. Ran DOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. Installed Windows 95 from floppy on a 486.
1999-2006: Several no-name Pentiums and AMD K5/K6/Athalon. Ran Linux (RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, countless others) and FreeBSD.

2006-2011: Dell Inspiron 1750(?) Laptop. Mostly Linux (Ubuntu). Briefly Windows XP and FreeBSD.

2008-2013: Several Work-issued iMacs running macOS and Linux.
2010-2012: Asus Eee PC 900. Ran Linux (Debian).
2012-2013: Asus Netbook. Ran Linux (Ubuntu) Now out of retirement and used.
2019: Chromebook 14a for periodic browsing. Runs ChromeOS and crouton. Mom’s old computer. Not used much.
Since 2013: MacBook Pros at work - macOS and Linux off and on.
Acer Aspire 1410 Netbook (Core 2 solo @ 1.4GHz; 2 GB RAM) with Arch Linux. Occasionally still used.

Many of these were used as home servers over the years. I ran my own e-mail servers at home for several years, along with web servers and an assortment of other things. I hosted e-mail and web content for myself mostly, but had a few users and a couple of niche projects related to customizing desktop environments.

I started using Linux on my desktop around 2000 and continued to until I started exploring FreeBSD, which I ran on most of my workstations from 2004-2007 and most of my homelab from 2004-2020. From there, It’s been a mix of more Linux and macOS on my workstations.

See my “uses” page for more information about what I’m currently using.

Josh Beard

My old computers