In 2007 I lived in an apartment in Eindhoven. This photograph is from the living room. My main computer was on the wooden desk on on the left side of the picture.
On the left side of that desk, there is a big laser printer, I think it was a Lexmark. I bought it back in 2003 on the used market. A new toner cartridge cost more than the printer itself. The monitor is a Philips 19” LCD screen, that I still have. There was an old IBM heavy keyboard. The black tower case was the main computer, a Core 2 Duo, that I bought in the autumn of 2006. Originally it had only 1 GB of RAM, later it got 4. The white box on top I got as surplus material from my employer. With some hacked together Linux software, it acted as an NAT router. Cable internet allowed you to connect one device at that time. Cable modems did not yet include their own built-in NAT routers as later models would have.
I had a fancy sound card and a DVD burner, that I used regularly to burn CDs. And I ran 64-bit Linx: the Gentoo distribution.
The other photograph is from my larger bedroom (the spare room). I used my smaller bedroom for sleeping.
On the left we see a large Mycom branded (one of the larger computer stores in the Netherlands) tower case. It had a DVD ROM drive (only a reader, the writer was in the main PC). Below that, there was a 5.25” floppy driver that I salvaged from an older PC. Below that we see a SCSI tape drive and finally we have a 3.5” floppy drive. I purchased the machine originally in the autumn of 2003, a Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM. It was hyperthreading, but not a true dual core. On top if this we see a Mac Mini, the original one from 2005, PowerPC-based with just 256 MB of RAM. Both of these machines ran Gentoo Linux. The PC dual booted with Windows XP and the Mac dual booted with OS-X (the PC in the living room was Linux only). To the right of this PC we see a Liteon 17” LCD monitor and the Apple keyboard. Both were used with the MAC Mini.
The metal box below that Apple keyboard was an “industrial PC” with a Via EPIA board. It ran Debian and I occasionally used it for unattended recording of radio programmes. I had to hook up a radio to the audio input for that. To the right we see a Microsoft keyboard and a 17” CRT monitor. Both were used with the PC on the left and occasionally with the VIA EPIA machine.
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