An AWS developer turns his Maple Valley garage into a working computer museum that runs modern AI
Darko Mesaros has gathered more than 100 working computers and 1,000 items, and dares vintage machines to run today's AI.
Darko Mesaros, a distinguished developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, no longer parks a car in the garage of his Maple Valley, Wash., home. It is filled with server racks, CRT monitors and vintage workstations he rescues, repairs and then tests against modern artificial intelligence.
The collection spans more than 100 complete computers, from an early-1970s minicomputer to Silicon Graphics workstations from the 1990s and HP machines from the 2000s, plus about 25 game consoles and nearly a decade of Byte magazines, more than 1,000 items in all. He finds gear at Goodwill, on local marketplace groups and through Seattle’s retro computing community, and has never sold a piece.
Growing up in Serbia, his only computer from 1991 to 2003 was a Commodore 64, so he missed the era of Sun, SGI and HP workstations. The machine he would save first is a blue Silicon Graphics Indy, the first SGI he bought. “Buying something that’s broken and then having that excitement of fixing it is just fantastic,” he said. The garage doubles as the set for his AWS videos and live streams.
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