mermaid

an imaginary sea creature fabled to have a woman's head and upper body and a fish's tail.

[C14: from mere lake, inlet + maid]

Mermaid was bought in 1996 with money saved from Coke sales, and with member donations. It was bought as components from City Business Machines.

Mermaid has had many configuation changes, adjustments, hacks and tweakings in its short life, as it has proved somewhat unreliable. Most of this has been due to the heat produced by the CPU - in our haste to buy something new and non-Intel, we bought one of the early Cyrix 6x86es, and put it on one of the first boards to be certified for it. Aside from eating two IDE disks in two years, Mermaid seems to now be (semi) stable.
Mermaid had a CPU change mid-1999 as the Cyrix chip proved unstable. It is now a Intel Pentium 166 and significant improvements speed and stability have been noticed.
Mermaid died several times during 2002 due to overheating. It was transplanted and appears to once again be stable.
In 2005 it was transplanted into a dual 400MHz Pentium II and serves as a Xen host.
In 2006 it suffered another disk failure, but swapping the controller board with a spare that [DAG] happened to have lying about worked fine.
In late 2007, Mermaid moved to yet another set of new hardware but kept the same name - a dual Xeon with 2GB of RAM. It stopped being a general user box and web server, and took over duties as a Xen virtualisation host.

[AHC], [TDH], and [DAG] for finding drives to replace the dead ones, at short notice.