Same here. In the late 90s when I started in tech I worked at this defunct consulting co. doing life cycle support at Motorola's corporate headquarters. They just threw away old hardware so I scored some old Macs and a Next pizza box. My first experience with Linux was running it on some m68k Macs I saved from the trash compactor. Later I salvaged enough parts to get a couple PowerPC Macs running and installed Debian on them. I turned one into a firewall/router and ran a web server on the other. Repurposing old hardware was kind of like our generations equivalent to buying a Raspberry Pi. :)