I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.
I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.
It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.
But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.
For me it was the diversity. Even though the machines themselves were similar, some did some things a lot better than the others. Some had ridiculously fast disk IO (the Suns, usually), some had silky smooth mouse movements (the SGIs), and so on. Also, there were the different GUIs - I loved Sun’s OpenWindows - and SGIs could use better font smoothing (but only NeXT was doing that back then).
As a geek, I miss exotic Unix hardware with their shapes, colors, and RISC chips. As a nerd, who needs that when AMD64 and Nvdia get the job done.