I brought it in, checked it for rust or damage, let it dry for several days, and ordered a hard drive for it. It runs fine, and I use it as a repo/build server.
Then again, I could probably find a downloadable OS for it somewhere online.
Restart that Indigo, and log on as root, no password.
When doing various services on these machines, I would keep a drive ready to boot miniroot. Would clear the root password, archive the hash, then do the work, put it back and on to the next gig. Most of the time nobody even knew what that password was.
Took {big company IT} quite a while to finally call and ask how those services were getting done...
Whereas I would expect that in the 3rd world by the time you got your fingers on it it must have been technically beyond salvage.
Crystal radios are neat!
What did you do your soldering with?
My first soldering iron(s) were simply screwdrivers in the stove :)
I even recycled the solder but it took a while to understand that you need flux as well as solder to make a good joint.
My first soldering iron was huge! I don't remember who gave it to me, but it was clearly not for electronics. It had a small wooden handle and a tip that looked like a large, bent flathead screwdriver. It could remove parts, but not much else. Ha! gotta love google. It looked something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Soldering-Handle-Chisel-Point-Copper/...
Thinking back, my grandfather was a carpenter and left a shop full of tools when he died, so it's possible that it used to be his.
I remember asking for a real soldering iron as a Christmas or birthday present and getting a low-wattage one since they didn't cost that much. Until then, everything was held together by wrapping wire onto leads.
The strange thing is that I remember having a small soldering iron, but I don't remember ever having actual solder.
And I still can't stand waste.
One day we will look back to this age and wonder: how on earth could we have been so wasteful that perfectly good stuff ended up in a landfill.
That soldering iron of yours looks like the perfect tool for some SMD work.
I recall those in the hands of stained glass workers, either that or gas heated ones.
My first upgrade from a screwdriver looked like this:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/pEUAAOSw621hLQqd/s-l1600.jpg
Which actually worked well enough for tube based electronics, (not even hole through, just built up in the air on metal frames). And it held the heat a lot longer than the screwdrivers, which tended to carbonize after a while.