Re: Just got a Pi1B. What can you actually do with it these days?

On 2025-06-06, TronNerd82 <tronnerd82@aol.com> wrote:

As the subject header would imply, this morning I got a Raspberry Pi 1
model B from eBay. I was initially tempted to futz around with Slackware
ARM on it, but that distro last supported the Pi 1 in version 14.2,
while the latest stable, 15.0, doesn't support it.
>
Raspberry Pi OS was right out since I recently saw its performance in
the modern day in a recent Jeff Geerling video on YT.
>
So I went with the best possible choice for a fast and reliable OS on
such old hardware: NetBSD.
So far, things have been pretty decent, especially in the TTY. In X11
there's not a whole lot I can run at once, but it's OK for light
websites (as in, SUPER-light - even SearXNG will crash most browsers I
try).
>
But aside from super light work, what can I actually do with this thing?
I doubt emulation's much of an option, and I remember seeing one of
these running Quake, so that might be worthwhile to get working.
>
If you can think of any productive use-cases for an original Pi model B
(not even the B+) let me know, and I'll consider it :-)

I have an original Model B rev 1 with 26way GPIO and only 256M RAM
which I must admit I don't use much.

But my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B rev 2 with 26way GPIO and 512M RAM is
hooked upto a Gert Board, and I use it for my odd forays into AVR chip
programming, and to play interfacing.

My RPI 1B+ with 40way GPIO and 512M RAM was until 6 months ago my backup
server. It had a 1GB USB2 attached hard drive, and it could be powered
on and off from my Pi4B home server to do a secondary backup of
important stuff. Backup was using rsync so only changes saved, and yes
it was slow, but it all happenned automagically at night for many years.
Been replaced by a 3B+ and a bigger disk connected by a powered USB3
adapter.

I would only run the early Pi's headless. They'd make a reasonable time
server, DNS server, probably even pi-hole. My god, we used to NFS serve
home directories for a couple of biggish labs of Linux machines from a
Sparc server with 32M RAM in the 1990's :-) It's amazing how little
grunt you need for some jobs.