The desk I got for $100 at a small computer store. Office furniture they were trying to get rid of; probably because it was too big (it's a huge desk, and it was a tiny store). I don't know what brand it is; but it's very heavy and solidly constructed. Steel top with a very hard paint fake-woodgrain finish. I bought it because it would be big enough for several monitors and computers.
The center monitor is a ViewSonic PT810-2M, from about 1996. Bought used from www.erpcsales.com a few years ago. Was a real bargain at $577 after shipping. (This was back when no good 21" monitor cost less than $1100 new). The display was pincushioned and warped originally (I suspect it had been around something magnetic); but after about a week of tweaking the controls (fortunately, this thing has a *lot* of controls), and regular degaussing, it looked pretty good.
The other two monitors are Hitachi SuperScan Mc801HRs. Bought somewhat later at a local monitor repair shop, they cost quite a bit less.
I run all my displays at 1440x1080x16bpp@81Hz; originally because that was the maximum resolution my old Matrox Mystique with 4MB of VRAM would display, where I didn't see flicker. (I stop seeing flicker at about 81-82Hz. It's interesting when you have one display at 85Hz and another at 75Hz... after long enough, you'll develop eyestrain in the eye that's on the side of the monitor that flickers).
In case you're curious (or looking for this sort of thing), here's the XFree86 modeline I use:Mode "1440x1080" # Vid board's limiting speed DotClock 170.00 # hdisp, hsyncstart, hsyncend, and htotal HTimings 1440 1444 1740 1864 # vdisp, vsyncstart, vsyncend, and vtotal VTimings 1080 1084 1099 1120 EndMode
The keyboard is an IBM Type M from 1986 (yes, 1986). One of the best conventional keyboards ever made. I hear the originals had a steel back on them that was heavy enough that you could beat someone to death with the keyboard. I don't have any like that, but mine are indeed solidly constructed. I've gotten a few of them; mostly from government auctions. (gov't auctions are great places to get stuff cheap... I once got an IBM Pentium-90 server with 96MB of RAM and a 6-drive RAID array for $4. Downside is that it's microchannel. Also got a Sparc 5 for $30, and this was just the local county auction.)
The router (little black box on top of the black cube) is an Ascend Pipeline 75 ISDN router. Mediocre piece of equipment to configure; but it serves its purpose. Since I work for an ISP, I get ISDN service for free. :)
The white computer is a 486/100 with 72MB of RAM, running OpenBSD. Serves as my firewall. It's been cobbled together from spare parts I bought at auction or swapped for. Last I checked (03/08/2002) it had been running for 237 days. Only reason it hasn't been up over a year, is that the power went out one night, for long enough that the UPS wouldn't have been able to handle it. I do actually have a little 14" monitor attached to it, on the other side of the desk. This is mostly so I can ssh into my workstation and reboot it remotely in case I break something when messing around with XFree86.
In case you care, the black cube computer is a Blackbird from a now-defunct company called Spindletop. The case is a Yeong Yang YY-22 cube; one of the coolest cases I've ever seen or worked on. I modified it a bit for better airflow (5" fan at the front to replace a 92mm one, and an 80mm fan at the top blowing straight up), and cut a hole in it to route the serial cable for the LCD panel. It houses a 1.1GHz Thunderbird K7 ('Athlon' is just too silly a name), and 1.25GB of memory (bought an extra gig of memory for some pocket change, when memory prices were obscenely low).
As of 03/10/2002, I'm running Linux 2.4.18, and discovering just how cool it is under load. Today at one point I was:
