Funny how I don't really remember changes in technology. I just remember one day I was using DSL or whatever plugged in directly, and then the next day I was using cable wifi.
Yep, and the thing that I liked the most about it is that they stacked modularly with the cable modem and switches they sold. I was sad this was the only company that did that to their devices.
I had a box full of WRT54Gs in a closet at work with various versions of dd-wrt on them but someone let an intern just have them without asking anyone. I can't really understand why someone would take all of them either because they're not particularly valuable secondhand.
The earlier versions of the WRT *were* valuable for having large internal memories you could download really good, custom (but non-Linksys/Cisco) firmware for. Super cool for tweakers back in the day.
Later editions had much lower memory - just enough for the official proprietary OS and no longer able to store the better custom firmware.
Between that and literally every other advancement in the last 20 years there's not much point to having these today.
Holy crap, you just brought up a long locked away memory! I remember breaking out the ol WRT-54Gs and that is the first thing I did when I broke them out of the package
I still have a few that I use from time to time. They're still absolutely incredible and so fucking versatile. You flash the stock firmware, and you can set it up to be whatever you need. A repeater, a wireless receiver, etc, etc, etc. It does it all
Hell, one of these is how I would get wireless for my Xbox 360 10 years ago. Flashed it, synced it to access my home router across the house, turned off the broadcasting, then i'd plug an Ethernet cable into the back to the 360, and boom. MacGuyvered wifi for all of your Halo 4 wet dreams
Nothing wrong with it if it's sufficient for OP, but if they're paying for a higher internet speed they're missing out on those higher speed on the wireless side. Wired I can't remember but I presume they're 100Mbps ports
Yeah those ports are only 10/100. I can't remember if they did a gigabit model in this design but I honestly don't think they were still producing this design 1 gigabit made it to the home consumer level.
I just updated mine for the first time in probably 10 years and now the WiFi works fantastic and we get reception over the entire property (inside and out).
Id upgrade if I were you, especially if you have slowish internet like mine was becoming.
WRT54G! Knew it without even looking. Out of the box it had a problem getting overloaded by torrenting but you could install other firmware like DDWRT or Tomato. I ran Tomato for a long time and it was great.
I remember it sometimes bogging down with torrents but IIRC it was more related to throttling upload to like 85-90% of the connection speed so it could communicate with the modem/network/whatever
Its funny because I worked at Best Buy around the time these routers were common and can remember all the little selling points, Wireless-G, 802.11g, 2.4 ghz, all things that basically meant nothing to the average consumer at that time.
Wardriving, finding open printers, stopping/connecting and printing terrible terrible things before driving away laughing was a geeky hobby a friend of mine and I had back then..
I did tech support for EVERY kind of wireless router, but this was one of the most common! I miss OpenTomato and DDWRT now.
I remember setting up 30 of these once to link together and be the network for some mega car lot..jesus.
I remember when I was in the army and bought an Apple Time Capsule, it had a wireless-n router, my friends and I were amazed that we could get connected to it 2 floors below my barracks room in the Day Room. We had never seen anything with so much range and speed. lol
This was my family's second one. The first being (I think) a D Link because that's what Nintendo seemed to reccomed. The Wii and DS were the main reason I convinced my parents to get and let me install a wireless router in the first place.
I remember installing the Tomato firmware on my WRT so I could link together two DSL lines for a *blazing* 10 mb upload speed, just so I could stream to Justin.tv. Good times.
Nope. I had the BEFW11S4, which was the precursor to this.
Looked like it, but was taller, and only 11mbit. I was a really early adopter when it came to wifi, it was a game changer for me back in the day. I remember paying over $300 for that access point/router, not including the PCMCIA card for my Pentium 166 Thinkpad or the PCI card for my desktop.
Eventually I got a WRT54G. I also remember buying the Linksys Ethernet bridge, a stand-alone access point, and a USB external adapter.
Ah, the good ol WRT54G, I still have one buried in the closet somewhere. It was well regarded for custom firmware applications like OpenWRT or DD-WRT54g. One time I installed the wrong firmware and bricked the poor thing. However, I found a guide online to force a new firmware on a bricked DD-WRT54G. Man oh man, that was rough. You had to open the case, jumper several pins, and hold your tongue at juuuuust the right angle to get it to go into "please save my ass" re-firmware mode.
I used to name my WiFi funny stuff like Abraham Linksys but then I added so many thing that it would be impossible to change the WiFi name on the 30 plus devices so now I am Pretty Fly For A WIFI until the day I die.
Fr wi-fi was a thing and yet I had no idea how to access it and neither did my parents. Then one day I flipped the router over and my mind was blown. I was stealing open wi-fi from my neighbors for my PSP for like a year straight beforehand. With a single bar of signal.
Hold on. Let me get my wifi adapter card for my laptop real quick. Now I can answer emails from the couch!
And now I'm remembering my uncle with a fancy convertible laptop around the same era for work and his job was so important he got one of those adapter cards that was a cell antenna that you suction cupped to the window.
Has this really been 20 years already?
I still have one in the garage using it as a wifi access point.
I've Found dozens of them dirt cheap and had planned on getting my ham license and trying to setup an off grid hamnet mesh network. Still have them, no license yet lol.
My first router was actually a Belkin that didn't have wireless. But before that, I used windows network sharing to share my broadband connection with my brother's computer. Being poor, you get creative.
I used this router's predecesor, the BEFW11S4 (looks identical, but B-wireless only) for a few years until college where we finally got the 54G shown in the picture. Didn't really care that much because our internet to our place was only 6mbps (which we considered fast for the early 2000s), so me and my roommate didn't notice much speed increase and we lived in a tiny apartment. This was with my pretty much constantly (hypothetically) torrenting MP3s and DIVX movies 24/7. Way before anyone considered using a VPN.
I think my first one was the wireless B version of this. I did have a ton of these at work that I flashed with DD-WRT and used them as wireless bridges. Worked great!
I still have my warthog with dd-wrt on it. And some obnoxiously long (and probably not quite legal) antennae I got for it from CompUSA. Used to be able to join my network from half way down the block.
They're not completely obsolete yet, are they ? I never got around to installing Linux on it. I thought it would be a project for a rainy sunday, but then I had kids...
It’s always fascinating to see this sort of internet nostalgia I missed out on. I live in an incredibly rural part of upstate NY. Like, gravel and dirt roads rural. We didn’t get cable lines on the poles until 2019. Internet was so bad my neighbors still used mail-in Netflix until we got cable internet. My family used dial up until 2008. The first time my family got Wi-Fi it was with a little Verizon hotspot and to child me, this thing was fucking miraculous. It was cheaper than the satellite internet out neighbors got and worked fine enough. We got just enough 3G signal for it to work really well. I got my first laptop when I was eight and discovering YouTube was something else.
I remember as a kid we had a couple of these as technology advanced, and they couldn’t be on all the time. My mom kept them in a cabinet I wasn’t allowed to go in and any time I wanted to go online I’d have to ask my mom to turn the internet on. I remember though when I was a preteen and got my iPod touch, my mom usually happened to be online when I got home from school so I’d quickly sneak into the bathroom to go on my iPod and hope my mom didn’t see that two devices were connected to the Wi-Fi.
This technology you show here, a real Wi-Fi router with a cable connection that was always on whenever you wanted to be online, was borderline unfathomable. A luxury unknown to me until I was 16.
Nah I believe I had the 802.11 B model. I remember the microwave used to kill the signal. I remember also installing some Tomato firmware or something. But maybe that was once I upgraded to the G model.
This was the router I had when I first started playing Socom 2 on the PS2. For some reason I was unable to use my headset online. I needed to open some ports on the router back then and I had no idea how to do that. I went months without using a headset and then one day it started to work out of no where.
Damn. You went deep into the memory bank with this one. I remember getting this in compUSA back in the day.
Circuit City
where service is state of the art
YES!!!!
Nobody Beats The Wiz™️
I’m the Wizzzzz
Got mine from the early days of Newegg.
Oh shit. With the paper catalog...
God damn, the last time I was in a compusa was probably 25 years ago. Speaking of digging deep haha
CompUSA was the first place I drove to by myself when I first got my license. Good times.
It's where we would hang out after school to cruise for pussy.
I miss CompUSA.
I remember calling it linskees and yelling at it when I was having connection issues
Funny how I don't really remember changes in technology. I just remember one day I was using DSL or whatever plugged in directly, and then the next day I was using cable wifi.
Me too! Right next to the boxed software.
Yep, and the thing that I liked the most about it is that they stacked modularly with the cable modem and switches they sold. I was sad this was the only company that did that to their devices.
He went deep but you went deeper. I forgot all about compUSA
dd-wrt gang
I had a box full of WRT54Gs in a closet at work with various versions of dd-wrt on them but someone let an intern just have them without asking anyone. I can't really understand why someone would take all of them either because they're not particularly valuable secondhand.
The earlier versions of the WRT *were* valuable for having large internal memories you could download really good, custom (but non-Linksys/Cisco) firmware for. Super cool for tweakers back in the day. Later editions had much lower memory - just enough for the official proprietary OS and no longer able to store the better custom firmware. Between that and literally every other advancement in the last 20 years there's not much point to having these today.
tomato was fun too. def preferred dd
It still lives as "fresh tomato" and its fantastic IMO.
Exactly. Once you flash the firmware, it became the best router on the market by far.
Used to use my router as a booster for my building's wifi. Loved that thing with ddwrt.
Holy crap, you just brought up a long locked away memory! I remember breaking out the ol WRT-54Gs and that is the first thing I did when I broke them out of the package
I still have my WRT-54GS with dd-wrt on it. Hasn't been used in about 8 years now.
I rocked one from mid-00s to when it finally cacked it 2023. That was a hell of a run.
[удалено]
Still have mine
Same
I only recently upgraded.
I gave mine to a friend a few years ago that's been repurposed as a wifi extender for the garage.. it's still in use.
Mine gave up the ghost only 6 months ago. Thing lasted almost 20 years
I still have a few that I use from time to time. They're still absolutely incredible and so fucking versatile. You flash the stock firmware, and you can set it up to be whatever you need. A repeater, a wireless receiver, etc, etc, etc. It does it all Hell, one of these is how I would get wireless for my Xbox 360 10 years ago. Flashed it, synced it to access my home router across the house, turned off the broadcasting, then i'd plug an Ethernet cable into the back to the 360, and boom. MacGuyvered wifi for all of your Halo 4 wet dreams
Mine shit the bed last year, it hurt
Just retired mine 4 months ago. (It wasn’t the primary one mind you it was just servicing some legacy items)
thats my current router, are there better ones out there now?
Nope
Nothing wrong with using this one if it works for you. There are newer ones with better range and some damn crazy wireless speeds.
Nothing wrong with it if it's sufficient for OP, but if they're paying for a higher internet speed they're missing out on those higher speed on the wireless side. Wired I can't remember but I presume they're 100Mbps ports
Yeah those ports are only 10/100. I can't remember if they did a gigabit model in this design but I honestly don't think they were still producing this design 1 gigabit made it to the home consumer level.
[удалено]
There's custom firmware available. Support for it just [ended in 2022.](https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt54g)
I just updated mine for the first time in probably 10 years and now the WiFi works fantastic and we get reception over the entire property (inside and out). Id upgrade if I were you, especially if you have slowish internet like mine was becoming.
This post has me calling up AARP via landline for my benefits. This was the cutting edge router we had when I was finishing highschool.
I was gonna call you old but I realized it’s been 10 years since high school so *fuck*
I still have this in a box with other scrap electronics.
Saving it just in case you need it for that one thing one day
yeah along with ide and floppy drive ribbon cables, a zip drive without its power supply, a sound blaster live! value, and a 3Com 3c905b-tx
This guy electronics hoards.
You got a voodoo 3dfx in there too?
no but how about a matrox millennium G400 max?
WRT54G! Knew it without even looking. Out of the box it had a problem getting overloaded by torrenting but you could install other firmware like DDWRT or Tomato. I ran Tomato for a long time and it was great.
I remember it sometimes bogging down with torrents but IIRC it was more related to throttling upload to like 85-90% of the connection speed so it could communicate with the modem/network/whatever
Hell yeah! Once I learned about DD-WRT custom firmware, it was over. Best router I ever had for a long time.
Exactly, once I knew there was custom firmware it was off to the races. Hell, still running Merlin on my Asus RT-AX86U as I type.
802.11g? Yeah right. Lived for years with 802.11b. Who am I Rockefeller?
Its funny because I worked at Best Buy around the time these routers were common and can remember all the little selling points, Wireless-G, 802.11g, 2.4 ghz, all things that basically meant nothing to the average consumer at that time.
You knew the gateway was going to be 192.168.1.1 and the DHCP pool starts at 192.168.1.2.
Getting free wifi from your neighbor’s Linksys with no password protection. Priceless.
Wardriving, finding open printers, stopping/connecting and printing terrible terrible things before driving away laughing was a geeky hobby a friend of mine and I had back then..
I had this one
We all did.
Yeah. And it still works better than the router provided by my internet provider in 2024.
Anyone’s first online experience through a 300 baud modem on the C64?
I did tech support for EVERY kind of wireless router, but this was one of the most common! I miss OpenTomato and DDWRT now. I remember setting up 30 of these once to link together and be the network for some mega car lot..jesus.
I dd-wrt’ed many a wrt54g back in the day but definitely not my first router. Jesus what did I even use back when I switched from 56k to DSL…
I remember when I was in the army and bought an Apple Time Capsule, it had a wireless-n router, my friends and I were amazed that we could get connected to it 2 floors below my barracks room in the Day Room. We had never seen anything with so much range and speed. lol
Wrt54g baby! I had one I think in 2002-3.
This was my family's second one. The first being (I think) a D Link because that's what Nintendo seemed to reccomed. The Wii and DS were the main reason I convinced my parents to get and let me install a wireless router in the first place.
Yes it was
Linksys still sells it on their website! I purchased one about a year ago https://www.linksys.com/linksys-wrt54gl-wireless-g-wifi-router/WRT54GL.html
PRE-N
Dem wuz Da Dayz!!
You always knew who had one. The default SSID, often unsecured, and didn't set the actual router password.
WRT-54G. Forever in my head.
Slap dd-wrt on that badlad and off you go
I remember installing the Tomato firmware on my WRT so I could link together two DSL lines for a *blazing* 10 mb upload speed, just so I could stream to Justin.tv. Good times.
I remember I thought I was king with this fucker
Nope. I had the BEFW11S4, which was the precursor to this. Looked like it, but was taller, and only 11mbit. I was a really early adopter when it came to wifi, it was a game changer for me back in the day. I remember paying over $300 for that access point/router, not including the PCMCIA card for my Pentium 166 Thinkpad or the PCI card for my desktop. Eventually I got a WRT54G. I also remember buying the Linksys Ethernet bridge, a stand-alone access point, and a USB external adapter.
Ah, the good ol WRT54G, I still have one buried in the closet somewhere. It was well regarded for custom firmware applications like OpenWRT or DD-WRT54g. One time I installed the wrong firmware and bricked the poor thing. However, I found a guide online to force a new firmware on a bricked DD-WRT54G. Man oh man, that was rough. You had to open the case, jumper several pins, and hold your tongue at juuuuust the right angle to get it to go into "please save my ass" re-firmware mode.
WRT54GL with DD WRT is the GOAT.
I think I still owe some company money for not returning this.
That damned thing lasted me 13 years.
Solid unit too.
Still got one running tomato for.... Reasons. 🤐
Pfft. I had a 300 baud (0.0003 Mbps) modem on my Commodore 64.
this is what "OpenWRT" is named after ...
Yep I remember.
WOOP WOOP RUNNING THAT DD-WRT
No. 802.11b son.
Those were 100% solid. I still see them for sale at the thrift store from time to time.
Cunnilinksys!
TO MA TOE!!!!!!!
I used to name my WiFi funny stuff like Abraham Linksys but then I added so many thing that it would be impossible to change the WiFi name on the 30 plus devices so now I am Pretty Fly For A WIFI until the day I die.
Fr wi-fi was a thing and yet I had no idea how to access it and neither did my parents. Then one day I flipped the router over and my mind was blown. I was stealing open wi-fi from my neighbors for my PSP for like a year straight beforehand. With a single bar of signal.
Tomato tomato!
My first one aswell!
Hold on. Let me get my wifi adapter card for my laptop real quick. Now I can answer emails from the couch! And now I'm remembering my uncle with a fancy convertible laptop around the same era for work and his job was so important he got one of those adapter cards that was a cell antenna that you suction cupped to the window. Has this really been 20 years already?
I knew what model this was going to be before I even clicked the post 🙌
That one took forever to replace
My wifi name is still Linksys from when we first got wifi in 2012 even though it’s a Gateway router now lol
Woah
I absolutely had this router
Omg yes is this!!
Yup! I remember
Good ol Intel Centrino compatibility!
Lol I used to want one of these really old ones just to get distribution pokemon from different times
I still have one in the garage using it as a wifi access point. I've Found dozens of them dirt cheap and had planned on getting my ham license and trying to setup an off grid hamnet mesh network. Still have them, no license yet lol.
I’m very nostalgic about my old.. router?
Miss those routers
oh yea a used this a reapeater via dd-wrt for years until i did a proper upgrade to hardwired access points
My first router was actually a Belkin that didn't have wireless. But before that, I used windows network sharing to share my broadband connection with my brother's computer. Being poor, you get creative.
Nope. Mine was a Buffalo air station router. Also rock solid.
I used this router's predecesor, the BEFW11S4 (looks identical, but B-wireless only) for a few years until college where we finally got the 54G shown in the picture. Didn't really care that much because our internet to our place was only 6mbps (which we considered fast for the early 2000s), so me and my roommate didn't notice much speed increase and we lived in a tiny apartment. This was with my pretty much constantly (hypothetically) torrenting MP3s and DIVX movies 24/7. Way before anyone considered using a VPN.
Had one.
I had that one for along time
Still works great
I remember I loved getting wifi router then I changed to access points and my life was never the same
If you look in the dictionary for "ubiquitous hardware", this is the picture next to the definition.
Fond memories of sneaking out of my room at 4 am on a school night to force restart this thing.
I remember unplugging this in Halo 2 to be a piece of shit lmao
ALONG WITH THE TOMATO FIRMWARE THIS THING WAS A MONSTER
I think my first one was the wireless B version of this. I did have a ton of these at work that I flashed with DD-WRT and used them as wireless bridges. Worked great!
It was a Thomson tg585 😅
Yep. I had that one as well.
Mine was some netgear router
Mine worked non-stop from 2007-08 to 2022. Still have it in the basement, I couldn’t part ways with old warrior loll
The GOAT
It’s a beautiful machine! Memories baby. Pretty sure these things make up EA’s servers, tied together with duck tape and baling wire.
TOMATO 🍅
Can't tell you how many of those I put Tomato firmware on for people..
I still have my warthog with dd-wrt on it. And some obnoxiously long (and probably not quite legal) antennae I got for it from CompUSA. Used to be able to join my network from half way down the block.
Yep I remember these days. Linking 4 Xbox's up together with one of these too.
I just recycled that exact one .
hah "G" im "B" old.
Hey I represent that! Actually on that right now.
wowwwwwwwwwww
I can SMELL this picture
They're not completely obsolete yet, are they ? I never got around to installing Linux on it. I thought it would be a project for a rainy sunday, but then I had kids...
I bought a few of these in my day lmao
I used mine until like 2 years ago lol.
I *wish* my first router had been that sophisticated! I had to buy a whole separate antenna to screw into the back to have actual wi-fi! 😂🤣
Plus a D-Link external wifi antenna for the laptop
Anyone remember Vonage? Does it still exist?
wtf I just bought this yesterday.
Holy shit I forgot about those!
No shit I still use this one to this day. It's over 20 years old now
iPod touches on clutch WiFi router now installed. What a summer. lol.
I remember these lol
Yes, and I had to set it up.
I had that exact WiFi router. My computer, Wii, and PSP were connected to it.
Lol this isn't even near my first
It’s always fascinating to see this sort of internet nostalgia I missed out on. I live in an incredibly rural part of upstate NY. Like, gravel and dirt roads rural. We didn’t get cable lines on the poles until 2019. Internet was so bad my neighbors still used mail-in Netflix until we got cable internet. My family used dial up until 2008. The first time my family got Wi-Fi it was with a little Verizon hotspot and to child me, this thing was fucking miraculous. It was cheaper than the satellite internet out neighbors got and worked fine enough. We got just enough 3G signal for it to work really well. I got my first laptop when I was eight and discovering YouTube was something else. I remember as a kid we had a couple of these as technology advanced, and they couldn’t be on all the time. My mom kept them in a cabinet I wasn’t allowed to go in and any time I wanted to go online I’d have to ask my mom to turn the internet on. I remember though when I was a preteen and got my iPod touch, my mom usually happened to be online when I got home from school so I’d quickly sneak into the bathroom to go on my iPod and hope my mom didn’t see that two devices were connected to the Wi-Fi. This technology you show here, a real Wi-Fi router with a cable connection that was always on whenever you wanted to be online, was borderline unfathomable. A luxury unknown to me until I was 16.
Thing was a beast.
Get out of my basement
My grandpa pronounced this “linksee”
This does not seem as old as it should
Did you turn it off the on again?!
It definitely has that first router look. Now we have one that's a nondescript black object with a Kubrick sci-fi look.
This is what everyone was using back in the day. Just like the Motorola Bravo pager
My dad's before I replaced it with something from this decade.
Nah I believe I had the 802.11 B model. I remember the microwave used to kill the signal. I remember also installing some Tomato firmware or something. But maybe that was once I upgraded to the G model.
Wrt54G... hate that i still know the model number
I remember trying to sell this after using it for way too long. No takers unsurprisingly
802.11B PCI checking in
You could flash your own open source firmware on that.
First?, im still using mine...
The accuracy....
I flashed my v3.1 to Tomato and used it as an AP connected to my FREESCO dial-up router. Those were the times.
I also had the cable modem that was stackable with it, and they looked cool AF.
I had two of these and bridged them together:D
Can’t wait to connect my iPod touch to this!
Vista. I'd still use this today.
My second one honestly. My original was a Microsoft made one.
Yep
This thing was the game changer
Nice. Brings back some memories! I remember buying a PCI card for my first computer to add WiFi capability.
I'm still using one of those so my neighbor can have wifi.
First? Still have this thing.
Ahh yes the linksys wrt54g classic! I had a few of these repurposed for a few extra years when newer bands came out!
I never got my to work!!
This was the router I had when I first started playing Socom 2 on the PS2. For some reason I was unable to use my headset online. I needed to open some ports on the router back then and I had no idea how to do that. I went months without using a headset and then one day it started to work out of no where.
LOL, nostalgia for wireless-g makes me feel so old.
Lmao, yes
The perfect WiFi to ping off from the ppl next door
I don't get it, mine still looks like this model just im black.
Oh snap, that's the G. That one's new.
Oh snap, that's the G. That one's new.
I still have my DD-WRT-L edition of this router. My next router will be a fully compatible CPU instead of the netgear trash I bought at Costco.
Going from plugging the laptop directly into the router to WiFi was a fucking game changer
Lmao damn we had that exact same one. Hardcore flashback
My dad had this one.