Got my first mini (good to see lower-case-m-mini used most often, heh) about a month after the g4 models landed -- it's still running Panther too -- and the second came long about six months after that (still ticking over on Tiger), my #1 son gave me a G4 1.5 for yule the same year and that one's got Leopard on it still. Being an independent tech I'm often gifted with the leftovers after assisting in a new-machine upgrade, so I think I had another six or seven of the li'l PowerPC lunchboxes pass through my hands over the next six years, each one I spruced up and gave them to friends as home iTunes servers, and I've only heard of one failing since!
I picked up a late-09 in mid-2010 on special just before they went unibody and that got modified & upgraded almost immediately -- I rehoused it into an old LC630 case so I could use it with a full-sized Pioneer burner and a 1TB Hitach SSD and used it as my main machine on Snowkitty for about three years before I rehoused it again. I popped 8 GB worth of G.skill and a 120GB Intel SSD into it and then fitted it into the bottom optical drive bay of my trusty PowerMacintosh G3 minitower, set up RealVNC and ran it as a buried headless machine as my sole OS X box to handle all internet duties. Brutus, my G3MT, packs a 350 MHz chip, 768 MB RAM, an R7000 and runs MacOS 8.6 off a 2GB Transcend IDE flash module and handles everything I need except internet, which is the mini's job whilst I control it with VNCthing.
(It's nice being able to minimise one window and make the internet nisappear
)
I've had another eight old minis through these old hands over the past six years, still no unibodies though; two were DOA, five went off to new loving homes, and the last one, another late-09, I rehoused into this solid IBM Netvista desktop case I'm inherited (the old 630 case died of plastic cancer, as they usually do) and I'm still quite pleased with how it turned out:
... so I enjoy messing around with older machines, at least they have character
