@ajroach42 If the earliest one is a 386 (or thereabouts) I think most of them could be made useful today. A home mail server or a static web server (or your gopher server) could happily live on something that small and slow. Just whack a 500 MB hard drive in there off eBay and you're good to go.

Even older stuff can be useful too. There were some gorgeous little portables like the NC100 which give you a full keyboard, a small LCD screen, a word processor, and BASIC. Those things are wizard for writing on the go. Anything that needs an external screen, though, like a Commodore 64, is probably only good as a hobby machine.