Rest in Peace Compaq Deskpro 486/33
For 16 years, this hardworking 486 desktop computer has served our company. It started out life as a high end CAD workstation, progressed through the ranks as a spreadsheet number cruncher, then a word processor, then an IT lab workhorse, and finally served for the last eight years as our primary public DNS server. In that time, it ran OpenBSD 2.6, which was updated with security patches while they lasted, but the machine has run exposed on the Internet without a single patch and completely without downtime since 2002.
Last week we had a scheduled power outage in our building, and the box was shut down. When it came back up it’s hard drive was all corrupted and messed up. Some repairs to the filesystem got it running again for a few more days but on Saturday it gave up the ghost. I built a temprorary replacement for it today, but somehow I don’t think the new box will last us quite as long.
Denys suggested we take it to a taxidermist and have it mounted for display. I’m thinking that might be a good idea.
If you want to make this an opportunity to upgrade from a 486/33, I have a perfectly good Pentium 200 MMX available that I may be willing to work out some kind of a deal on. It’s only 12 years old so there should be lots of life left in it.
Cheers…
Have you considered mounting it in a perspex case? How cool would that look :D
just slap a cf->ide adapter and a 1g card in that puppy. It’ll run forever.