[pedrocr]

> They are perfectly good machines as servers and desktop terminals.

On the power usage alone surely an upgrade to a still extremely old 64bit machine would be a significant upgrade. For a server that you run continuously a 20+ year old machine will consume quite a bit.

[yobbo]

Among the possible reasons for keeping old machines are specific expansion cards or peripherals that only work on old motherboards.

Whether that motivates debian support is another question.

[adrian_b]

Indeed. I still keep around a couple of old computers, because they have PCI slots (parallel, not PCIe), unlike any newer computer that I have, and I still use some PCI cards for certain purposes.

However, those computers are not so old as to have 32-bit CPUs, they are only about 10 years old, but that was because I was careful at that time to select MBs that still had PCI slots, in order to be able to retire all older computers.

[p_l]

The only peripherals that truly don't work in more modern boards would be AMR/ACR/CNR? ISA and plain PCI being reasonably easy to acquire expansion boxes (might be a problem for EISA though, I guess...)

[alexey-salmin]

I mean, if you have antique hardware why not run an antique OS on it? What's the point of upgrading?