My best example of this (currently) is at home... I have an old 1995 (or so) era whitebox PC, with - I think - a 100mhz Pentium processor - running Red Hat Linux 9, serving as my firewall. It's ancient and I'm scared that every time the power goes off or something that it'll never boot up again. But it quietly sits there running iptables and routing traffic between my cable modem and the rest of the network.
Outside of my home, I saw an ancient DEC PDP/11 still in use at a newspaper in North Carolina as late as 1999 when I worked there. They also had an old IBM S/36 which only got replaced with a (then) modern AS/400 box about 1999. One of the machines they had in there (and I'm not even sure which one it was) used those old drum-based disk drives, with the big drum with the spinnable handle on top, that weigh about 20 lbs each, and old a whopping 50MB of data.
Absolutely. But it works, I've gotten used to that particular box sitting in that particular spot for years (and it serves as a platform to stack books anyway), and the power cost is probably negligible anyway. So, given all the other things I could spend time on, why would I bother futzing around with that?
And I think that's kinda the point about a lot of these kinds of stories. Everybody knows that there is a better solution, but inertia, lack of resources, and or risk related to the new solution, keep people from doing anything about it.
So, one day sooner or later (probably sooner) the power supply in that thing will crap out, and I'll bite the bullet and reconfigure my network to use my wireless router to do all that stuff. Unless... I think I may have another one of those power supplies in a box in the closet somewhere....
Outside of my home, I saw an ancient DEC PDP/11 still in use at a newspaper in North Carolina as late as 1999 when I worked there. They also had an old IBM S/36 which only got replaced with a (then) modern AS/400 box about 1999. One of the machines they had in there (and I'm not even sure which one it was) used those old drum-based disk drives, with the big drum with the spinnable handle on top, that weigh about 20 lbs each, and old a whopping 50MB of data.