Zippy is being retired from his duties as resident webserver and keeper of the network at the MacArthur house. The DNS entries have been updated, and next weekend the plug will be pulled on our dear friend.
He was purchased in 1995 as a state-of-the-art top-of-the-line creation from Gateway Computers. His main duties back then were surfing the fledgling world wide web and typing out a senior thesis on a technique for measuring the specific heat ratios of gasses. Many operating systems have graced his hard drive - Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, and RedHat Linux. Several upgrades have been made to internal components as well.
The most dramatic was the day the motherboard cooked itself. After a reboot, Zippy was crawling. Operations which normally took a handful of seconds were taking several minutes to complete. Strange beeping noises, not unlike R2-D2 in Star Wars, were emanating from the speaker when booting. Gateway, still a reputable manufacturer in those days, ascertained the problem and had a new motherboard shipped. In a few days Zippy was feeling like new but with a slight increase of 9MHz on the system clock, bringing him from 66MHz to 75MHz.
We'll miss you big guy!