Mr. Orc’s computer adoption service
A long time ago, when I was developing Webshield for McAfee, I started to accumulate a huge collection of computers, and I continued this orgy of capitalistic excess through the next few jobs, right up to the point where Maximum Leader Genius overthrew the government of the United States and the economy obligingly cratered. At that time, I had something on the order of 50(!) x386 boxes lying around either at home or at where pell, et alii, are colocated. After a year or so of unemployment, I started giving them away (many, but not all, thank G-d, of these computers cost >$1000 when I first assembled them, but the frenzied pace of computer obsolescence reduced their value down to approximately $0 pretty much immediately after purchase) and scrapping the ones that didn't have enough value to give to anyone.
Today, I officially reached the bottom of the barrel. I'd promised a machine to a friend in Los Angeles and a couple to a nonprofit here in Portland, and spent part of this morning prepping the hardware, only to discover that I'd run out of machines and had to salvage memory from the new (as in "only three years old") Pell hardware to get all three of them bootable.
50 computers, all gone! All my spare hard disks and memory, all gone! All that's left now is a small stack of old slow pentia and '486 boxes (I'm not scrapping the '386 box, and I've not getting rid of the old P75 box that I used to develop Webshield on, because the work I did on that box paid for about a third of the house I'm living in) which I'll either freecycle or dismantle (I've got a few old Macs that I won't be scrapping, because Apple built all of their early Macs out of plastic, which is, um, not much in demand at the recycling houses) and then the house will be back down to the state of clutter it was in before we spawned and started seriously exploring the frontiers of entropy.