My Old Computers

My old computers

This is a personal archive of computers I’ve used, rebuilt, borrowed, or kept around over the years. It is not meant to be complete, but it captures the thread that led me from old family machines and spare parts into Linux, BSD, home servers, and eventually a career working with infrastructure and software teams.

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, and ran Windows 95, 98, and 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/Athlon. 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.
Acer Aspire 1410 Netbook (Core 2 solo @ 1.4GHz; 2 GB RAM) with Arch Linux. Occasionally still used.
Since 2013: MacBook Pros at work - macOS and Linux off and on.
2022-2025: MacBook Air M1 (work)
2021-2025: MacBook Pro Retina (2015) - Arch Linux
2025: MacBook Pro M4 (work)
2025: MacBook Air M4 (personal)

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.

Josh Beard

My old computers