I've built many old systems from 386 and 486 systems, from simple firewalls, to routers to dedicated jukebox machines.
Even older computers work fine with older operating systems, the oldest I have recently built was from a 286 8Mhz 640kbs RAM laptop with 'New Deal OS', which could surf the net or email.
Old computers today, were the best in their time, and did their jobs well, the only reason people think they need bigger and fast machines is due to marketing, people generally have more power than needed. Most really do not need a 3Ghz machine to write a email, surf the net or type out a resume.
There are many floppy disk based Firewall systems, which turn an old machine into a dedicated firewall with no hard drive, just a floppy image & 2/3 nics.
I am currently running a packet filtering box with Apache SSL web server, SSH server, email server, DNS caching proxy & weather service on a thincleint - 233Mhz, 64megs RAM. Originally had QNX 2.0 on a Disk-on-Chip OS, which was bypassed and i wired in a IDE connector and power supply to supposrt a 1gig hard drive.
Then the other machine is running at 200Mhz with Squid caching Proxy and Dans Guardian for content filtering. 1 gig hard drive as well.
With 5 boxes connecting to the packet filtering machines, the average CPU load is 0.05%. This is on a 233 GEO Cyrix CPU machine, and the Cyrix is really a poor quality chip with its tiny 16kb cache. (compared to the 512kb cache on Athon XP 'Barton" core I run on main system.)
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