
Ask HN: What do you do with your crappy old computer hardware? - KennyFromIT
We all have computers from the past that we have acquired through various means; old Pentiums, laptops, SMB servers. Unfortunately, these machines are often far weaker than today&#x27;s low-cost alternatives (eg. RPi&#x27;s). Also, after scavenging for parts, the only viable solution seems to be to recycle them.<p>Prove me wrong.<p>Is anyone doing anything neat with old hardware that the rest of us could try?<p>I&#x27;m thinking along the lines of taking a hodgepodge of weak hardware and combining it together to run a lite K8s cluster. Or some kind of processing behemoth that Dr. Frankenstein would appreciate. Or better yet, something that would break the internet if everyone started doing this with their old hardware. Just looking for fun ideas to try. Thanks!
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suramya_tomar
In college (early 2000's) we connected a lot of old machines (486's & Pentium
I/II's) in a Beowulf cluster and got a fairly reasonable processing speed.

Creating a cluster is also a great learning opportunity.

