The original Mickey (also known as Frankenstein's Monster) was put together out of donated spare parts, and originally did sterling service routing packets between our internal ethernet and the outside world.

Eventually, it was upgraded from a 4 MB 386 to a 486DX2 with 8 MB RAM and an old IDE hard disk, with RedHat 4.1 on kernel 2.0.27. However, the case was of gargantuan proportions and the power supply made Microsoft operating systems look reliable, so they had to be ditched.

Shorn of any form of protection, Mickey spent several weeks lying naked on John Ireland's bookshelf. Then, an opportunity presented itself to see if Mickey was still alive... but the video card appeared to be broken.

After a variety of revival attempts, Mickey was finally restored to working order in Hilary Term 1998. Running Red Hat Linux 5.0 and supporting SSH through a firewall, Mickey was proving reliable under a variety of loads.

Mickey was then kidnapped and after spending a brief spell in Stuart Adamson's room (where he installed FreeBSD, added a second network card, connected the two cards together and left Mickey forwarding gigabytes of data every day for a week) it spent until October 2003 in Trinity acting as a firewall for the rest of the network. It was then retired due to reliability problems.