You can turn old laptops into "servers", or raspberry pi's, or hell even a commodore 64 for that matter. As long as it serves something of value over a network it qualifies.
I think the fact you felt the need to put the word servers in quotes does a lot to show that you and justincormack are talking about computers serving a similar role, but with such laughably different requirements that it's obvious what point he was trying to make, and your statement, while technically correct, doesn't really change his point.
You are correct though, people do use commodity and low-end hardware for extremely light server needs, and even in data centers.
I put servers in quotes to denote something that serves that wasn't purpose built for the role. Nothing more, the context from justincormack wasn't lost but there are a lot of uses for osx servers, for example compile farms.
What I was referring to, which I thought was apparent but failed to convey, is that this perception of nobody doing it is a fallacy.
We are saying the same thing. My post wasn't meant to contradict yours, just clarify.
> What I was referring to, which I thought was apparent but failed to convey, is that this perception of nobody doing it is a fallacy.
I just think that in this context the "nobody" you are referring to and the "nobody" he is referring to are not equal sets. Yours is a superset of his, which is why both statements are true (in spirit), while yours is true in fact.
You can turn old laptops into "servers", or raspberry pi's, or hell even a commodore 64 for that matter. As long as it serves something of value over a network it qualifies.
Whether its a good idea is another matter.