Hello everyone from downtown Kitchener, Ontario where The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project. TWC Comprec has been running since October 2001. A couple of years ago we joined the ranks of Community MAR (Microsoft Authorized Refurbishers).
Initially the project began in the basement of our 43 Queen Street location as a way to support TWC's job counsellors and grew into a community refurbishing project. Linux played a role in the Computer Recycling project since the very beginning with one of the volunteers, Paul N. (now a part of TWC's overall IT staff), giving a talk about putting together a Linux distribution for the PCs that were being refurbished. This distribution, WCLP, had a target machine of a 486DX66 with 16MB RAM and a 500MB hard drive. I joined the project in November 2001 as a volunteer for the WCLP sub-project of CR.
CR expanded to take over space on the second floor of 43 Queen Street during the first year. In 2005 I took over the general shop operation of Computer Recycling. By the end of 2005 we'd grown out of the space and added six times our previous space moving to the dark shadows of the basement of 66 Queen Street, and expanded our hours from 3 hours a week to 35 hours/week.
In late 2007 I developed an OSCommerce database and The Working Centre hired a PHP programmer to create a PHP POS front end to OSCOmmerce (which is more of an ecommerce solution than POS). Around this time we also started implementing our first MAR machines (Windows 2000 boxes).
Since then we've continued to be a mixed OS shop installing both Linux and Windows on systems.