I hope slightly off topic replies are allowed.
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Nowadays, laptops are 1/3 the price and 20 times more powerful. What we used to do in DOS (no multitasking here, folks) we now do in Windows. Networking is wireless. I even remember the first time I had a drive that broke the 1 GB barrier. There is now an almost endless supply of development tools at our disposal. Our "server", which at one time was nothing more that a Pentium II - 233 with a 4 GB Hard Drive running Windows NT SBS, has evolved into a massive, 20 TB rack mount sever that lives in its own climate controlled room along with redundant Linux servers to not only handle our development data, but to also handle file distribution and many other services.
Power Hungry Servers (Click to Enlarge):
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I just wanted to share a bit from my old home lab before covid changed everything. This is a few years (4-5) after I started collecting junk PCs and retired enterprise:
Early Gear
Nearly final iteration
Front: (Right before it was retired and gear was getting migrated)
Last front 2019
Front 2018
Back (a year or so before the front image hardware)
Back of rack
Lastly I noticed some familiar faces
UPS and PDU
This gear is used solely for my educational purposes, development and speeding up my work day. It contains only about 15-20% my own scratch built software, and is used heavily for helping me develop better tools for work-flow, some new 1023 software and tools, and lots of security tools. The base is a 3-node windows Hyper-V fail-over cluster, with 2 redundant flash based v-sans (also windows based) and 2 redundant storage nodes (windows). 2+1 on/off site redundant storage with windows DFS etc. Lots of VMs, some include Windows and Linux Kernel dev, full stack web dev, databases and redundancy, pbx, email, game servers. I built my own email services from on old Hmail fork. Scratch dns, dhcp, http proxy, e2e messaging, "real-time" distributed filesystem replication (early stages), custom win service handlers for managing other software, in win32 and .NET and plenty GCC. Alot more that were based off other builds or libraries but its been a couple years since I needed to touch them. Home automation, security, remote tools, vpn, and probably 3-4 other vms I forget what they do and tons of other vms and software. At one point it was supporting nearly 150 devices and 1g/1g fiber which I dearly miss.
BTW Talking pricing and memory, raw storage in that rack is just over 100TB total, just under 1TB of DDR3 and just under 200 CPU cores just in that image. Living in northern VA at the time its mostly made from retired US government gear.
I have a bunch more modern gear coming in with new nodes to replace the old gear. I had to run 3 20amp circuits to that rack and each one of those R910s could easily pull over 1200VA from the wall, and the power bill was getting to expensive
. Lots of 10g gear and can't wait to get the rack back up and get my whole lab back in order.
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Over the many years I have been in this industry, I have utilized every possible source and avenue of information that I could. Countless hours spent scouring the internet, reading... downloading... archiving... cataloging.
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I'm sure I have a good 20-30gb of archived data automotive and EEC.
To ask an on-topic question what was your original process of moving from "yeah that's a table" to "This is base ignition timing" starting out? I'm just curious at a high level how the work-flow started say at "SCT"? (We don't need to talk about disassembly etc)
Did you jump right into hardware "hacking" or was it more organized?