I’m big on retro tech (which, sadly, is becoming code for credit bills in a trenchcoat; why did I give all that good shit away :( ) and occasionally think “damn, I should try to get an old C64 or Amiga, specc it up and use it as a daily driver”.
Then I got to wondering “do folks still use retro PCs to self host cool stuff?”
So, do folks here still use retro computers for self-hosting- either actually hosting services on the old hardware, or self-hosting lightweight tools specifically for use from vintage machines?
Really old CPUs (486 or earlier) lack the computing power to do SSL at any decent speed. So you’re limited to serving http, gopher, nntp, or telnet. Maybe IRC.
You could have a modern computer handle the SSL connection and proxy requests through to the antique but some of the purity of the thing is lost by doing that.