The Beginning
Even before I called it a “homelab,” I found uses for home servers – mostly to replace multiple external USB hard drives. Although I grew up with Mac desktops, I became a laptop user in high school. Imagine being able to access my data from anywhere using my PowerBook G4! Or even better, being able to have tasks running without tying up my main computer. I bought a used Power Mac G3 tower (I later upgraded it to a G4 tower), removed the optical and Zip drives, then added ATA/IDE expansion cards and additional hard drive bays. That worked well for a few years. As a repair technician, I even used this method to build NetBoot and DeployStudio servers at work.