Post #1109704

Watching @ActionRetro 's latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiy5MIl03tY) this morning on building a router from an ancient PC hit me like whiplash because I did nearly the exact same thing, with the exact same machine, 25 years ago. By the year 2000, our house had a whole bunch of computers in it: - Dad's Power Mac G3 in our living room, which was the former family computer before the rest of us got our own - my Mac Centris 610 and Intel Celeron 366 PC, in my bedroom - my brother's 486 PC, in his bedroom - my mom's 486 PC, in my parent's bedroom Dad had run Ethernet cabling throughout the house the year before (Wi-Fi wasn't really a thing yet), terminating at a patch panel in the living room next to the G3. That panel connected to a 10/100 switch, which connected to the G3. Dad had installed a second Ethernet card in the G3, and we ran the VICOM Internet Gateway software on it to bring Internet access to the rest of the computers in our home. But this setup had two problems - first, the G3 had to be on if we wanted to use the Internet from any other machine. And second, running the Internet Gateway software on it slowed it down quite a bit, to the point where Dad was getting frustrated when he was trying to, you know, actually _use_ the computer. Meanwhile, I'd been reading online about these “linux servers" and decided we needed one to dedicate as our Internet gateway. And so one day, after school, I got a ride to a mom-and-pop computer shop in town and picked up an old Packard Bell tower - the same model in Action Retro's video - and brought it home with me. I think I only paid around 25 or 50 bucks for it, no monitor or peripherals, just the tower. I settled on a Linux distribution called "ClarkConnect” (https://web.archive.org/web/20010204025700/http://www.clarkconnect.org/) - downloading the ISO, burning a CD, and installing it onto the Packard Bell machine. I moved the second Ethernet card from the G3 into the new system, and put it under Dad's desk in the living room. It had some pretty cool features including a web server (where I put family photos up so the relatives could see them), and both Samba and Netatalk servers for file sharing support, making it really easy to transfer files between all the machines on our home network. I'm sure it was terribly insecure though - I didn't really know anything about Linux server adminstration, I mainly just followed tutorials that I read online. And it ran, pretty reliably, all the way until 2004 when it got replaced by a Belkin Wi-Fi router. We took it to electronics recycling. And like all the old systems we had at the time, I wish I still had it today. Always loved the design of that case. #RetroComputing