My first Linux box...

The computer on your right, my left, as I stare out of your computer screen, is Roland. Roland was one of the first computers to run Linux; judging from the traffic on the original linux-activists@niksula.hut.fi mailing list, my guess is that Roland was easily one of the first 50.

Roland got tired of sitting around at home idle, and so until June 1998 it happily slaved away as the internet gateway, www server, ftp server, and so forth for a small local software company. Roland is a 386 sx/16 with 8MB of RAM (yes, I splurged) and a 100MB hard drive. I'll have you know that when I bought that hard drive (for the express purpose of running Linux), it was on the large drives list.

Roland was later been replaced by a spare 486 that was sitting around their office; its prime asset was a larger hard drive. It is worth noting that Roland was doing so well at its job that it took over a year and a half for them to find time to switch machines so that they could give me my old computer back... Linux removes the perceived link between old and obsolete.