I enjoyed this article describing the history of the venerable Linksys WRT54G.
I had one of these running OpenWrt for years. It was extremely reliable and flexible. It was fun to hack around on it and I used the VPN quite freqently to get to files at home when I was travelling. Although I moved on years ago and now have an Eero with far superior speed and coverage, that ugly Linksys box was a great piece of hardware.