Nerd Cred
Networks & Computers
My bedroom, which housed our home network, taken in the fall of 2002. Note the large 5.25” drives mounted on the wall, and the Cisco programmable router.
The monitor belongs to our server, which was an old 486-DX2 running Slackware with Apache/PHP and had a whopping 3GB of storage, not including the tape drive. This was later upgraded to a dual Pentium 3 system so I could run a telnet BBS.
My first laptop. I forget the model number, but a Dell Insprion. The blue cable out of the back goes from the serial port to the console port on the router. At the very bottom, under the table (which used to be our dining room table), you can see the bottom of the server. It was a full-tower-sized beast. My (musical) keyboard is to the left, and it looks like some homework and flashards are next to me (possibly from AP US History). This would have been near the end of my junior year in high school.
Note that this was also at the time when AOL Instant Messanger was still somewhat popular.
Some old hard drives mounted on my wall. One of these held a whole 0.5 megabytes. The other held a few megabytes. These would have probably been used in the 8086⁄8088-era computers
The upgrade from our 486 server was a Dual-PIII server. I vaguely remember buying this on ebay. I then upgraded the processors to 500MHz each and added ECC ram. It was quite a solid server, running Slackware/Debian/OpenSuse or whatever we threw on it. I ran a small telnet BBS off of it as well, mostly to play TradeWars 2002 with some friends.
I had a small collection of old computers. This is the inside of an IBM PS/2. The layout was kind of odd, with riser cards everywhere and a big honkin’ battery (yellow thing, bottom left corner). The bottom of the picture is the front of the computer. The hard drive held 30 MB.