Does anyone have an idea for a fun/interesting use of 4-5 38 and 486 machines? I would like a few ideas for something that I could use such machines for as a cool project. Some more interesting that a file server or router.

Ideas and opinions would be much appreciated

Thanks

Really big external hard drive?

Well that's an idea, but I doubt these babies can handle big HDD's which woudl be required to cluster and produce a very large one.

Try installing DeLi Linux on the 486:
http://delilinux.berlios.de/
to make a light desktop machine. Add an old ISA network card and hook it up to your home network.

Tell me afterwards if it works

Martin

Just stumbled over this page:
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/oldpc/

Please, let us know what you did with those old machines!

Martin

386's and 486's are hard to get parts for... I did get one going recently and to splice in 2 aa batteries on the clock and such, but was hardly worth the effort... Then the drive died and it's so hard to get working drives the right size... Pentium class machines are so much easier to work with... But even they are getting harder to get stuff for... Tho I did get a p150 up and running the other day with 64 meg ram. No running mdk 9.2 and kde, mozilla and kmail internet machine for my sister to use. works pretty good...

But I've dumped most of the 486 machines as they are mostly dead...

You could put a TV Card in them, hook up some bigger screens and use them as TVs.

I was hoping for some fun project which I can could interest the students at the school where I teach in. I'm doubtful that buidling a pc to use as wordprocessor would be interesting to them.

And do ISA tv cards exist?

Thanks for the input thus far.

No, probably not, I looked on my TV Card box and the lowest sys req processor is a 90 MHz Pentium 1, which is newer than 386/486

Learn about clustering, and make a cluster farm. Compare the speed of the cluster with that of one system at the same speed, as well as maybe a newer p3/p4 system. get a distributed.net client, or some other set-it-and-forget-it kind of application like that.

two words, beowolf cluster

-Joey

The cluster would be interesting.

Maybe OpenMosix?

I have a 486 with 16 MB RAM that now has a 4 GB hard drive. So far it is booting MSDOS, PTSDOS, and Zipslack. I have all the files downloaded for a DeliLinux install next.
I want to see if I can use the ISA modem and ISA network card.

The amount of RAM and hard drive space could limit your choices. Do you have that many monitors?

You mean to say each OS has it's own monitor of the 486 with 16MB or ram?

Yes I think that many monitors would not be a prob.

The cluser ideas I like very much. But question, what interesting (not just to geeks) application could such a cluster be used for?