On the way home from work one night, I was listening to NPR. And they had an interview with some founder/CEO of a company that is in the business of hauling away computers from big companies. Retrobox.

I.e., the companies pay Retrobox to take the old computers, wipe the drives and dispose of the nasty stuff in a good manner. In part, this is driven by ecological concerns, but more by legal concerns such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPPA, which sorta forces companies to NOT divulge data.

OK, the other trick to this Retrobox company is that it takes the computers and – before disposing of them – tries to refurbish (sorta) the machines and – if successful – sells them on the site. Some revenue split happens between souce company and Retrobox.

I was intrigued – I’ve checked local ads and all that (and I’m in the burbs of Chicago; there is a lotta stuff out there), but I could not find what seemed good for me at a good price.

I wanted to upgrade (uh, replace) my current linux box (Pentium Pro, 200Mhz, 128M) with a better box. All the ads I’ve read are too expensive, because they give you MS Office etc.

So I did a Retrobox seach. Got a nice P3, 1Ghz, 1 GIG RAM for about $200.

Took about two weeks to get here; so what?

Put Fedora Core 4 on it; transferred some files, and I’m good to go!

Highly recommeded (I’m looking at blade servers now…)