I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be.
The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
I was so annoyed that the Linksys cable modem, that came in the exact same color scheme was not stackable with the routers. You had a wifi router and a non wifi router in the same exact case with same exact front panel. But no, the modem was completely different form factor.
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.