Obsolete, was Speaking of cubes

I just peeked in the dictionary, Obsolete means "no longer in use". By that definition many things are clearly not obsolete, they are just not in the front lines anymore. What completely bends our perception is that most tracking is done based on cash flow, purchase of new hardware and software. Older machines shift very little cash, and often zero additonal money is spent on software, so no tracking, it drops off the radar. Ranking machines based on the cost of ownership, and thinking more is better is kind of nuts isn't it? I brought home 5 Compaq Prolinea 575 desktops this week. Nobody at the scrapyard wanted them as complete computers. Parasites had already looted the ram out of three of them, and were eyeballing the 420 MB hard drives, when I decided it was ridiculous to allow that to happen (W95 that works for the 575 was about all that was on them, but sheesh, why effectively throw that away?). With modest effort (considering I know nothing about a PC) I got them running on my LAN and surfing the web via ethernet and my cable modem. Slow, but not THAT slow, mostly they appeared to be suffering fix). A closer look at the motherboard revealed a couple PCI slots between the ISA, so I figure with decent NICs these old crates will wail running Linux doing cheesy network duties (ftp, email, dns, and web for local use only).