After the FidoNet era wound down, the focus shifted to Linux. A home network grew in Augsburg with a Smoothwall firewall, a Red Hat server, a Postfix/Apache mail and web server, and a multimedia workstation, all connected over 10 Mbit thin-Ethernet and a demand-dial RAS connection. A FreeBSD server ran Apache, Sendmail and Perl scripts alongside a Windows NT 4.0 file server. Microsoft certifications in Windows NT 4.0 and IIS 4.0 followed in 2000, and the work at IXOS SOFTWARE AG as a Web Engineer rounded out the professional side. The retro hobby took a back seat during this period, but the collection of old machines was still growing quietly in the background until 2005. The location, network and projects pages of the timecapsule have the full story.
Everything got reduced down to what I actually used daily. The old collection was gone, and the stack became an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad, with no PCs at home for the first time. A Windows notebook from work was the only non-Apple machine in the house. In 2017 a Chromebook from Google joined the setup for everyday tasks. The retro hobby was completely dormant during this period, but on the iMac the first steps into Arduino, ESP32, MQTT and a Synology NAS laid the groundwork for the smart home setup that would follow later.
+Everything got reduced down to what I actually used daily. The old collection was gone, and the stack became an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad, with no PCs at home for the first time. A Windows notebook from work was the only non-Apple machine in the house. In 2017 a Chromebook from Google joined the setup for everyday tasks, and a Synology NAS arrived, running MQTT and the first ESP32 LED matrix projects. Arduino and ESP32 development started as a parallel hobby around the same time. The retro hobby was completely dormant during this period, while on the iMac .NET Mono tools kept things running.
In 2020 the retro computing hobby came back in full force. The Mega ST 4 fleet was rebuilt, the MiSTer and MIST FPGA boards were added, and this site was born to document it all. The machines from the 90s were given new roles instead of gathering dust: a workstation, a demo machine, a reference piece, and a spare.