I remember being quite young and my parents going to the one of the local computer shops and getting a beige box Pentium 3 at 450mhz that we used for a while. The shop put Quake on there because they had kids, and I remember the first time I played it my mom instantly went and uninstalled.

A few years later in ~2004/5 I dug that same beige computer out of the closet, bought some extra RAM (I think it was 256mb total I could fit in it) and used that to host a private Lineage 2 server, which is how I got into databases / software development in the first place. With a whole bunch of tuning I could run ~50 people concurrently on that machine without terrible lag.

Eventually I had enough people who donated that I could upgrade to a newly released Athlon x2 stuffed into a rack mount case, which I sent to a colo.