The drawer next to the desk has a pile of small boards: a couple of Raspberry Pis from different generations, two ESP32s wrapped in tape, a few discrete sensors with their pin headers already soldered. Most are doing useful work. The rest are waiting for an idea.
what the old machines still do
A 2012 ThinkPad runs the home backups, a tiny linux installation with nothing on it but rsync and ssh. It will outlive any subscription cloud I could pay for. The Pi 3 next to it serves the local DNS so the workstation never talks to anyone else's resolver.
the rule
Hardware is rented forever; software is the lease. Whatever a board does today should still work in five years with no recompile. That is the whole reason these pieces are still here — small kernels, small binaries, slow updates.
the quiet pleasure
Repair beats replacement, on a long enough horizon. The soldering iron is older than the laptops it has helped fix. A loose ribbon cable can take a Saturday afternoon. The result is a workstation that boots faster, runs quieter and keeps fewer secrets than it did the year before.