one of these days, I want to buy:

a powerpc xserve (running OSX server)

a sparc box (on solaris)

an alpha box (on either VMS or Digital Unix)

a pa-risc box (hp-ux)

a modern power box (Rocky or AIX)

an itanium box (running either VMS or NT depending on what the alpha is running)

a pi cluster (plan 9)

and a commodity x86 server (running OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Hurd, Redox, Serenity, reactos, and AROS).

and make a MOAP (mother of all pubnixes). if anyone has any hardware they'd like to donate, get in contact :)

I have had many of these machines at various points in time, some even running on the public internet. They are a giant PITA to keep running and alive. This is why they don't usually last very long if they ever even get to public access(most don't).

Unless it's a super fun hobby for you, I wouldn't plan on this being very fun after the first dozen random crashes.