And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machines I then had which could run two 3C509 cards at once - who knows how I laid hands on those, but once I got it working it was a reliable enough setup for the whole more-or-less group house whose slant-ceilinged back attic room I lived in. Unlike in the article, we were within DSL range of the nearest CO and had no load coils to worry about, so any POTS extension would do - hence being able to have the whole house's network ops up in my little garret. I had a couple of desks and tables in there plus my little twin mattress and an Ikea Poang chair - and, thanks to a long run of Cat-5 I'd somehow managed to scrounge, not only 802.11b coverage for the whole house with one of the early-model WRT-54Gs, but even rudimentary internet TV for the living room with another hacked-together beige box and an All-in-Wonder card bought used with an employee discount from the cheesy little computer store I'd spent a few months working at. We even had four-player Gauntlet with MAME and a few cheap USB 1.0 controllers.

Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.

Floppydistros! The memories!

Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”.

What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)

Coyote, yeah! Same one I ran, and maybe the first time I ever actually put Linux to a useful purpose beyond satisfying my own intellectual curiosity - my first first time being a few years earlier with a Slackware floppy install on a Toshiba Tecra laptop. I had to scrape together enough disks for the A set, download and image them from the Windows 95 install, and then print out enough docs to figure out how to get dialup working again once I was done repaving the machine with a then totally unfamiliar environment - I'd bought the laptop used with summer-job money and it hadn't come with OS install media, so I either got it working or I was just SOL, with no access any longer from Tennessee to the mostly West Coast-based social circle that Internet access had made available to me, and no obvious way to recover the machine to a working state. Luckily, it didn't come to that! Good times. :D

Ironically we never did get the VERY EXPENSIVE 20MB IDE flash drive to work, to replace the floppy disk. I still have it.

…and the prices! He is “happy” because using those spare parts he can spend only 1300$ for a wireless router.

It seemed reasonable at the time. I briefly used a DEC Multia with two Aironet LM4500 PCMCIA wireless cards as a point-to-point backhaul and access point. That was a lot of money for hardware but the cable company wanted tens of thousands of dollars to bring coax a very short distance to the site, and ADSL in those days was still something you could expect to deliver just 128kbps upstream under ideal conditions.

We used to use old DEC alphas as firewalls figuring the arch was so obscure as to not worry about binary attacks.

And the fact that determining the true lat/long of one's location was best done by using mapquest.com (ah memories...). Unscrambled GPS for civilians didn't come along for another couple years.

Greg had had an early idea about traffic alerts, which actually worked pretty well, but it did not monetize. I dont know when he gave up on it...