This will likely only be relevant to a tiny number of people, but I’m too excited to keep this bottled up!

I discovered recently that IKEA’s BILLY bookshelf units are deep enough to hold my Baby AT and Micro ATX motherboard builds! Here’s a tiny view into one such shelf, showing the Melbourne i486 alongside my QDI 486:

This is awesome for a host of reasons:

• If I place each motherboard on a corkboard or mouse pad, I can easily slide the board out to take to the desk to work on

• I don’t need to remove any of the expansion cards to put it in a box; they’re all set up and ready to go. This is especially useful for boards and/or cards with marginal or worn connectors

• There’s still enough space on each shelf for drives and cables

• The BILLY bookcase has glass doors, so the boards won’t be bumped or get dusty

• Because they don’t take up that much vertical space, I could theoretically have half a dozen of these things

I mentioned on a recent BSD Now podcast with Tom Jones that I was increasingly frustrated at how much space “in progress” projects take up. He suggested getting some tubs or boxes to store such projects in temporarily, which I’ve started to do in earnest. This is the next step from that, specifically when it comes to old builds.

But here’s where the lightbulb went into overdrive. Wait, I’m mixing my metaphors again. If these boards have PicoPSU power supplies installed in their ISA slots, then… couldn’t they be used on these shelves as well? Have I just inadvertently built a “server rack”, but for old desktop boards?

The answer to the latter question is an obvious no, but if the shoe fits? Wait, there goes another metaphor. I’m picturing a KVM setup on a shelf that could then pipe the IO from each board to the desk sitting next to the bookcase. Each board could also have the requisite connections and adaptors connected, so my desk isn’t always full of them. For example, my RGBtoVGA to convert the EGA from older boards to VGA, and the AT to PS/2 adaptors for keyboards. It’d all be set up optimally for each board, and I wouldn’t have to constantly reconfigure and rewire stuff every time. But most importantly, they’d still be accessible if I needed to take them off the shelves to work on them.

And get this… I could draw the mother of all diagrams to explain how this is all connected. In ASCII art. For no good reason.

We’re getting some more shelving for this room, on account of Clara and I having more arts/crafts and tech stuff than we thought. Maybe it’s time to evaluate having a “rack” of these old boards. It’d certainly make the hobby easier.