This utter mess in a cardboard box is Ferretcage. It's an oddity in my collection. I sort of became the equivalent of a small-animal shelter for abandoned computers, partly because I'm a strange person that likes to push the limits and find ways to make them useful. In this case, it was the local e-waste shop, who had an entire bin full of these little mini-ITX boards, several years ago, at $50 each. My IRL friend - we'll call him Malachai - nudged me into picking one up. I didn't even really care about the specs; I'd find some way to use it even if it were the slowest computer from yester-yesteryear.
What I got out of that is this VIA C3-based motherboard - specifically, C3VCM6, manufactured roughly around 2001. On board we have a VIA C3 processor at 800 MHz, a stick of 256 MB of RAM in its single memory slot, a single unpopulated PCI slot in case I want to expand it with anything, on-board graphics, two IDE headers, and the usual array of serial, parallel, ethernet, USB and PS/2 ports. This machine would be roughly equivalent to a cheap Pentium 3. And that would be what I'd end up using it for, in 2008.
Ferretcage's defining feature (right now), though, is its vastly incomplete plastic project-box. This, too, was purchased at Malachai's suggestion, as a box with plenty of locations for stand-offs (though, it should be said, none that actually align with the screw-holes on the motherboard). Affixed to its removable front-panel is a giant green pinball-button, complete with tiny, incandescent light bulb. I never quite got around to designing a way to mount the motherboard into this case, because the back panel would not fit in there with the board installed, and neither of us had the tools to engineer it back then.
Once I'd gotten the absolute mess home and set up on my desk, using a spare desktop ATX power supply and a random hard drive that I'd had lying around, Ferretcage was "blessed" with a minimalist install of Xubuntu Linux. This was not altogether bad for it; it had enough RAM to serve duty as an ersatz file server, and with some assistance from Malachai, I did get it working (mostly) on a primarily Windows network. So I stored my sizeable music collection on it, a couple of times used it to remote-access said collection while out and about, using free Wi-Fi locations and a just-as-ancient HP Pavilion n5170 laptop. I'd dubbed that laptop "Gjallarhorn," after Heimdallr's horn that signaled the beginning of Ragnarok in Norse mythology. (If the internal beeper ever had to beep, everybody in the house heard it. Thus the name.) Gjallarhorn was, if anything, even slower than Ferretcage - but it was my first laptop ever, in 2008, and I loved it to death. ...Literally. It doesn't boot anymore. Poor thing probably needs a recap.
Around 2009, though, my family moved out of the house we'd been renting, because we'd once again found a house to own ourselves. So Ferretcage got packed away in a cardboard box, where I would fail to ever find the thing again until last year.
I pitied poor Ferretcage. But the last 15 years' worth of advancements would serve it well. In such time, hobbyist communities and corporations alike had developed quite the array of miniaturized solutions for very small computers. I acquired a laptop-sized SATA solid state drive and an adapter to fit its IDE header (I wanted an IDE disk-on-module, but got one that was the wrong form factor and gave up), and a PicoPSU to replace the giant brick of a power supply. With just these two items, Ferretcage now actually fit into its case (short of the back panel - the uncut plastic blank has gone MIA).
Where Ferretcage presently stands, I did manage to get an OS on to it (I forget which one specifically - probably Windows 2000), with proper drivers and support for its internal video and sound hardware. I've successfully benched Quake on it, and added it to my leaderboard spreadsheet. (That's something I should write about later down the line. I haven't poked at it in a while.) All of the functionality it needs is present. All that is left is...
...actually buttoning the case up.
I think more recent technological achievements could be of some use to it, as I could 3D-print not only an adapter plate to screw into the case bottom (to relocate the locations of the motherboard stand-offs), but also a properly shaped and sized backplate. Unfortunately, that'd require access to a 3D printer that I don't have yet, as well as a lot of know-how for measuring and modeling such things.
Ferretcage remains safely tucked into a plastic tote bin until such time as those things are ready. Which, with my lack of job at the moment, may be quite a while.