[isthisnickcool]

I was walking through a local electronics shop yesterday and I noticed about 15 1U rack servers all lined up on the floor. I asked one of the techs to give me a screwdriver and I popped open one of the servers. It had an Alpha chip, 500 meg of ram and 4 Seagate Ultra-wide SCSI drives. They want $50.00 for each server.

I bought one took it back to the office. It booted Linux 6.2 right up. So, I can likely change the root password or there are some recent distros that run on the Alpha. Now that's "cheap" computing:)

[Quix]

Congrats!

[freedumb2003]

Now that's "cheap" computing

I extended the life of an old, old laptop I had by installing MEPIS (which is a pretty friendly little Distro).

But I can't seem to get USB drives to behave properly. OTOH, I haven't had a lot of time to mess with it...

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

And alpha chips are mad fast too.

You sure those people knew what it was that they had on their hands?

[1L]

Don't know about Linux, but I'm sure you can erase the drives and install one of the BSD variants. I have 3-4 boxes running Free- and Open- BSD.

[hoosierham]

What a deal.

For other bargains check out hamfests(radio amateurs use computers) and trader type papers.

I have bought several ex-university computers for $20 to $40 .Most have lots of ram although now the hard drives are likely to be wiped,which actally both makes it easier and more likely that a non-Windows OS will get installed.