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Don Y wrote: Depends on the drive. I've had modern 80GB, and 160GB drives die on me after only about a year of use (funny how they go just past the warranty!). These were well taken care of drives. Meanwhile I have several 5MB 5.25" full height Seagate drives for my Lisa that are nearly 25 years old - and they still work, though they sound like jet engines when I turn them on.

The real problem with ancient x86 hardware is cost per watt. I don't mean the CPU, I mean the entire machine. A modern machine runs a lot more efficiently than an old 386, even though Intel CPU's were until recently notorious for consuming lots of power. There are very few things I can't do with a modern machine that I could do with an old 486 or 386 - even if it has to be inside a VM or emulator. That said, until very recently, I used a Pentium I 100Mhz with 64M of RAM as a router. Ran beautifully, and it served better as a router than taking up space in a junk yard. I replaced this with another aging machine - a PIII running at 500Mhz, which only uses 100Watts more - but I can certainly get a lot more out of it. So that old machine certainly cost me more to run than the new one in terms of performance for electricity used. I certainly don't need a 2Ghz AMD64 with 4GB of RAM for use as a router. Today. In 5 years from now, my desktop will be very likely be my router.

I tend to look at the early machines as a Cambrian explosion. We saw a ton of different kinds of machines, each unique in its own way. The

market made them extinct, so now we have only several handfuls of kinds of machines. But, those old ancient beasties were wonderful in their own ways. A 286, or 386 being the ancestor of modern common PC's makes it uninteresting - but only because of how common they were. A few of the ancient x86 line have some historical value. The 1st IBM PC, the Jr, the 1st laptops, the 1st portable PC, and so on are collectibles because they are the 1st of something. But a generic white box 386, meh.