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Technologies that Have Exceeded Their Expectations?
drfunch asks: "With the recent 'passing' of Pioneer 10 after over 30 years of service, I wonder what other technologies have far exceeded expectations. One example from my own experience is my trusty HP calculator, which is still going strong after 21 years. What technologies or devices have gone far beyond your expectations?"
I have a Casio calculator (FX501p) still running happily after more than 22 years!
I'd have to put Palm OS devices in this category. I have had a Handspring Visor Deluxe for nearly 3 years now. It's black and white. The are no fancy graphics or sounds. However it keeps a mean phone list, address book and calendar. As a Physician, I like the third party software that is a handy quick reference for pharmaceutical dosing information. I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to anything better.
The SR-71 Blackbird aircraft was in many ways 20-30 years ahead of time when it was first created and put into service. An amazing piece of engineering and materials technology.
I would have to say that my orginal Nintendo controllers has out lasted my expectations. 16 years old and I still have my orginal ones. Not like those horrible N64 controllers. I have to buy a new one of those every few months.
And just to tweak the youngsters at work, I still keep my trusty Pickett sliderule in my desk....
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
How about VHS technology ? I know that DVD is soon going to phase it out, but I mean seriously. The first VHS recorder was released in 1976! And I mean, if you exclude the ESP, EP, SP recording options, there wasn't really any major changes to the format since then!
I exclude SVHS because it's more or less a completely different format on the same media.
Kinda crazy if you think about it.
Oh and another thing - when I first started college, I bought a single Sony double-density 3.5 floppy disk. That's 12 years ago and it still works. Yes, yes, I know, floppies are obsolete... but really, I bought a box of 3.5s (figuring they'd be a lifetime supply) and I'm lucky if I get a dozen rewrites out of them. That original floppy has been overwritten literally thousands of times. What gives with that?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I bought that original Seiko LCD watch (the one profiled in Playboy and the Bond movies back in the early '70s, and believe it or not, the thing still works well after 25+ years. The only drawback is that it weighs more than small car and continues to make me lean to the left. Not a political position I enjoy. --AND-- that boombox that I bought in Japan (National Panasonic!)(1975) still pumps loud rock to this day. (it's also a heavyweight)
Invented more than 100 years ago, it's been refined to a point where it is very reliable and reasonabally effecient (from a chemical energy perspective).
Even a modern engine is still basically the same as the Ford Model T. We've just made it more effecient.
My first car, a 1975 Buick LeSaber had an Olds 455 that sucked so much gas I needed to take out a loan to fill the tank (and gas was $.34/l). My latest car, a 2003 Mercury Marauder has a 4.6l Cobra Engine that would kick that old 455 easily. It uses 1/6 the fuel with 3/4 the displacement developing 40% more ponies, and won't need to be rebuilt as often.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Not bad for LP (1948, Microgroove) and tubes..(Crap.. 1910's? DeForrest.)
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
If anybody had told me, that the mobile phone killer app would be short text messages typed out laboriously on a numeric key-pad, I'd have thought they were nuts. But the telcos are making billions on'em.
Quake, Super Mario Brothers 1 and especially 3. Sure the technology may be old and there are newer and flashier games, but these games are still fun to play, and I can't imagine I'm the only one who thinks so.
My father got a Western Electric 500 telephone about 1946, it was in daily use until about 1991 (about 45 years), outlasting three teenagers, cars, washers, refrigerators, water heaters, the roof to the house.... Heck, lubricate the rotary dial and it would STILL work. (Remind me why the telephone monopoly was wrong.)
Any conversation about miracle technology has to include my jeep-- There are others out there just as good, but mine is special.
:-) *furiously knocks on wood* /Ex
It's a 93 jeep with 300,000 miles on it, mostly original engine (replaced after about 400 miles. See police car below). Original transmission, and, well, basically over it's lifetime, we've put maybe 25000 dollars into it-- including buying it new and only two major technical breaks in its lifetime (transfer case and shorted computer chip), and all of the copays.
Three of the accidents were my family's fault-- Including the drunk in the truck. Cop called it her fault, but failed to give her a breathalyzer-- small town, cop didn't want to arrest his mom's friend. drunk contested, because of how she hit us, it looked like it was our fault, and no proof she was drunk. Let this be a lesson to you-- ALWAYS require a breathalyzer, even if it's obvious they're drunk, or the cop doesn't want to-- you can request it, and if the first cop won't, call 911, and say you were hit by a drunk driver.
Things that it's been hit by:
A) Big Rig
B) Police Car
C) Drunk in truck
D) New driver in new truck.
E) Idiot in el camino.
F) at least three other actionable accidents (had to have almost every panel replaced-- the roof is the one exception.
The most remarkable thing, 90% of the miles were put on within its first 5 years. After three years (180k miles), my parents stopped giving it regular maintenance("well, we're gonna sell it soon, what does it matter"), followed by not replacing the brakes. Six months later, they gave it an oil change. a year later "well, the brakes aren't getting any better".
Most of my friends received new cars on graduating HS, or before or during the first couple years of college. I got the beast because the dealer was going to give them only like 1800 trade in on it-- So my parents signed it over to me. Most of said friends have since seen their cars blow up/go kaput/stop moving.
Other than the cd player and the oil leak, there's nothing wrong with mine
has a whopping 512K of RAM and a 9" b/w monitor
runs on two 800k floppies
boots in 17 seconds
runs various useful office programs including MSword 3.0 which means WYSYWIG columns, dropcaps, styles, embedded images, footnotes, chapters, indexes, etc.
doesn't crash (EVER!!)
networked over a printer cable, once upon a time
entertained/survived two toddlers
was made in early 1985
I wrote a master's thesis on this thing in the backyard, squatting in the grass with a long extension cord, published books and 'zines, hauled it around in a shoulder bag on trains and planes and boats, and generally thrashed it with everyday use.
Recently moved 6,000km, and couldn't give it away or sell it, and since it still works, hauled it some more. It's set up for more occasional abuse, though it gets less and less.
I love hearing the particular sound of those floppy drives used as incongruous 'hacker' sound effects in cheesy hollywood movies!
Damn those pesky terrorists
A couple of years back my uncle found a locomotive in a wall in a house they were remodeling.
The loco was manufactured in 1917.
We dusted it off, put it on the track, powered it up and it ran just fine. Only thing that didn't work was the little light on the front.
As much fun as their new trains are, I have a feeling that their old engines will probably outlast trains made today...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
This is a firearm originally designed in the 1900's that is still one of the most popular designs of all time. The 1911 is considered by many to be as accurate, reliable, and rugged as any of the most modern firearms available. I inherited one that had originally been made for the U.S. Army in 1918 and belonged to my great-grandfather; it still functions perfectly to this day.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
My high school calculator ('87 I suppose?) is still going strong on the original battery. I bought two revisions of the el-506 since, both had a hard plastic slide-on cover that I thought would be nice, but both have flaked out and died. The D still balances my checkbook, converts bases, and does trig for me.
(My HS math teacher had a calculator from about 1970 that still worked at the time. It had red LEDs, which was cool compared to the boring black LCD displays ours had. The school had paid several hundred dollars for it. Funny to think my calculator is as old now as his was then. I wonder if his still works?)
I have an SE/30, dating to '89 or '90, that still runs wonderfully. I installed a 1.2 GB drive and bumped the RAM to 68 MB, and it runs NetBSD. I think my //gs still runs...
I remember a Guinness book record from the 80's, I don't know if it's been broken since, but there was a fire hall that had an old carbon-filament light bulb that still worked. They thought it dated to around 1910 or something like that. That's pretty cool.
Constitutionally Correct
My parents still have a rotary [pulse, dial...] phone in their kitchen. It still works just fine (after about 25 years of use from a family of 7) so there hasn't been a need to replace it. Although impatient people complain that you still have to wait a full 5 seconds longer to complete your outbound phone calls compared to touch-tone phones. (oh the horror!)
A friend of my younger brother was over there a few years ago and had to ask my dad how to use the phone because he'd never seen a phone without a number-pad on it. Pathetic. Times are changin and these young whipper-snappers aren't learning things that we took for granted. Like learning to read the time off of the face of a (non-digital) clock.
Anyways... back to the subject.
TV, telephones, wallclocks, pocket calculators (solar powered ones too), etc... there are a bunch of pieces of technology I use every day that have lasted beyond initial expectation.
I wish I could say the same thing about computers now-a-days. (Most are considered "old" or "out of date" within 6 months.)
Karma: NaN
I've got four of the old beasts and they all work like champs. The oldest is about 15 years old and apart from a missing keycap it is in perfect working order. Best keyboards money can buy.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The Mars pathfinder mission lasted far longer than anticipated.
Pathfinder's lander had operated nearly three times its
design lifetime of 30 days, and the Sojourner rover operated 12 times its design lifetime of seven days.
Look at any aircraft, and the main movement is governent by these four:
Throttle.
Ailerons (via "wing warping).
Elevator.
Rudder.
That basic configuration hasn't changed since Orville and Wilber used it in 1903.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Who would have imagined that after 20 years the C= 64 is STILL being sold in places like china? (last I read it was selling a MILLION units a year).
But that's not all, the machine was hacked so much *in software* that near the end of its life in the western world hackers could display 640 x 480 (oe 640 x 400?) high resolution graphics on a chip hardwired to produce only 320 x 240 (I think those are the numbers if I recall correctly, might be 320 x 200). Hackers also broke the sprite (i.e.: high-speed moving/animated graphics blocks) barrier from 8 (or 16?) to basically an unlimited number. Hackers also figured out a way to display graphics in the "overscan" area (i.e.: the black area around the display), thus increasing even more the resolution. You can also find software-based synthesizers that could extend the number of sound voices to 6 (or 8?). There were also hacks to make it seem as if it could display hundreds of colors (as opposed to 16).
Up to this day millions are still used for all kinds of control applications (robotics, telecom, industrial, etc).
I guess we could call this machine the world's most hacked machine ever (and pretty close in second place was probably the Commodore Amiga).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bought it on sale in 1976 for $2.00. A simple 4+ function calculator with memory - Technico HC-702.
A little text on the front says "2 penlight batteries for over 22,000 hours continuous use". And it still has the original OEM batteries, Casio AA, which look brand new. I use it several times a week, and have done so for 27 years now.
Well one this that most likely has outlived it's expectations is slashdot itself, i'm quite certain that when the first news was posted on slashdot, nobody expected it to become as big as it is now..
maybe it's just too obvious to notice.. =)
My 8088 still works, as does my old 486/33 with 8 MB of RAM which was, up until 2 years ago, running an older incarnation of RedHat, barely squeezed onto a 550 MB hard drive. It was a MUD and web server passably for years until I got tired of 45 minute compile times for the MUD. Now it's crunching numbers for Distributed, alnog with its first successor, a P166 that only lasted a year or so.
The fan on the 486 went out in 1998 and I never fixed it. The thing STILL works. It's outlived 3 hard drives.
I have a cocktail-table sytle vintage Pac-Man machine from 1982. The monitor blew out on it but the PCB, sound, and controls all work fine. I'm in the process of refurbishing and re-wiring the cabinet on it. It's a blast. I bought a new monitor but I haven't figured out how to hook it up to the 21-year old connectors from the PCB! (If anybody has any experience with this, email me: here, PLEASE!. I'm too much of a chicken to just plug it in and turn it in in case I do something Incredibly Stupid and Wrong and ruin it.
My dad's an accountant and he had an old adding machine from the early 70's that he kept on his desk when I was a kid. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I'll bet he's still got it somewhere. He also kept his first-ever calculator, which cost $100 at Sears. They had to make payments on it. Still works.
My desktop gaming PC pre-dated the advent of the Athlon chip, and despite it having never once received any hardware upgrades beyond a new Ethernet Card (it didn't come with one, that's how old it is), it still plays EQ, DAOC, MOO3, CIV3, Quake3, and every other game I'ev thrown at it. It's not always smooth, but it more than works. This isn't really old but I'm still amazed. I used to upgrade machines once every 2 years and add new hardware - never again. This was an $1800 machine when I got it and it's not received another penny of work yet and it's more than good enough. I expect it to begin to fail by this summer.
I have my original 8-bit NES. I mowed lawns for an entire summer to buy one of these in late 1984. All of my original carts still work, too. Mario 1-3, Final Fanyasy, Zelda 1 and 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Dragon Warrior, Ultima. Got 'em all, and the save-game batteries are all still good. Mario 3 gives me trouble sometimes and Zelda 1's battery is getting flakey, but they're in good shape.
My Atari 2600 still works but sadly I sold it before it was worth any money, but its current owner insists that it's still working fine.
I've got a 30-year old dishwasher in our house that still works well enough. Our water heater is pushing 16 years, which is ancient as far as water heaters go. Our furnace was 30 years old before we replaced it, which we only did because the 30-year old A/C unit went out and we figured we'd replace the whole mess now and not worry about it.
I bought a DVD player in 1995 that still works. Never been cleaned and it works fine. Sadly, it can't play some of the newest DVDs, I'm not sure why yet. It also can't play burned CDs or copy-protected CDs. Also have a VCR from 1981 that sometimes works, and a color TV from 1972 that just died a few years ago. Actually, it still worked but it was developing a big yellow blotch and it was one of those big monsters in a wooden cabinet that was twice the size of the TV. So we got rid of it.
This small ultra-portable came out in ... 1995 ?
I still use mine for almost all mobile computing. FreeBSD runs wonderfully on it and I can just as easily dial into Earthlink as I can hop on a wireless network - and with _two_ pcmcia slots, I can even set up a rudimentary wireless AP.
What technologies or devices have gone far beyond your expectations?
The feeble red light from the first light emitting diode could never have suggested full color displays and replacements for automotive tail lights, traffic lights, and even indoor area lighting. I was amazed to find white LED-based 120V incandescent light bulb replcements.
And to think there are still so many Earthlings who think that LED watches are a pretty cool idea.
Terrycloth Lobster
... the spark plug.
Spark plugs have not changed at all in at least 60 years, as far as the OEM styles go. They have been remarkably similar since their original designs, a graphite core surrounded by a ceramic insulator surrounded by a metallic threaded ring. Amazing.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The gasoline IC engine may in fact be near end of life, but diesel is definitely not.
In fact, a modern diesel engine with direct fuel injection and regenerating particulate filter rivals or may surpass Compressed Natural Gas "clean air vehicles".
Clean Diesel has a lot of practical promise.
In many parts of the US, electricity is principally generated using coal, natural gas, and diesel anyway, then 50-70 percent of the energy is thrown away as waste heat and of the remainder 12 percent is lost in transmission, of the remainder that makes it to your recharging station the battery cycle consumes 20 percent or so. In the end the best of all feasible electric cars is getting 40% thermal efficiency and is carrying an enormous amount of extra weight in batteries.
Clean Diesel hybrid vehicles with ozone catalysts on their radiators would do wonders for consumer adoption of more env. friendly technology, and all the technology is available TODAY.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
The Pioneer and calculator examples suggest "technology that has long surpassed its expected life time (durability)", while the main question asks about items that have exceeded their original expect uses (functionality).
I'm not too impressed with durability claims when it only involves a sample size of one. Do you know anyone else who owns the same model of your calculator?
The 707 airliner was developed about 1954 (I think). 707's are still used in the passenger carrying business a bit and are more common now in ferrying freight.
The F-4 fighter plane was developed around the same time and that thing is used in the world's militaries, including our own.
On the computer side, IBM has done an amazing job over the years in making its systems compatible with older incarnations, the result being that it is theoretically possible to run an old Fortran accounting program written in the 1950s for the IBM 650 vacuum tube beast on the latest and greatest IBM mainframe.... or so it is said. We in California should be grateful for this fact because the Department of Motor Vehicles, despite throwing tens millions of dollars at futile attempts to modernize their software and database, still uses software from the 1960s on much more modern hardware.
But all the kudos I have goes to my General Electric digital alarm clock that I've owned for nearly 20 years now and is still going strong despite numerous power spikes in the dorms early in its life and being dropped uncounted times.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I think the biggest changes in internal combustion engines over the last half century are the addition of solid state electronic management and improved production methods and materials. These have rendered high end technologies like the Merlin sported practical for mass production and distribution.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Launched October 18, 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It had some technical problems in 1991 (high gain antenna wouldn't deploy) but they were able to use the low gain antenna to send data back at a vastly slower rate).
It became the first spacecraft to take a close up photo of an asteriod and when it reacher Jupiter in 1995, the first space craft to drop a probe into a gas giant. It's mission was to last only until 1997, but it was given a two year extension. The mission continued another three years AFTER the extension, sending its last scientific data back in November 2002 as it passed the moon Amalthea. In August of this year it will burn up in Jupiters atmosphere.
The spacecraft has operated over twice as long as expected and has taken three times the radiation it was designed for, and still it mostly works. The plunge into Jupiter is because the craft is running low on fuel and they would rather burn it up than risk having it possibly slam into Europa, contaminating it before we can check for native ba cterial life there.
While it's certainly not lasted as long as Pioneer, it has taken one hell of a beating from the intense radiation of Jupiter, the tidal stresses of orbiting the gas giant and its planet sized moons as well as flying through toxic (and possibly caustic) volcanic plumes kicked off of the surface of Io by eruptions.
So I would say that Gallileo is in fact in the same class as Pioneer when it comes to be being built tough.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Read Greg Palasts book, the best democracy money can buy and you might rethink paper ballots. Perhaps it didn't have squat to do with ballots and everything to do with a the president-select's brother being govenor of the state in question. If you don't want to read, you could watch Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election.
It's still a little weird; may people post without having any idea what USENET is, but it still works, and is still (sort of) useful even with trolls and spam.
Best Buy can have you arrested
but it's not as if the CLI itself has improved dramatically
Don't you think that command-line interfaces have outlived past predictions from around the time when GUIs started to become mainstream? I find having to go back to plain (Bourne) sh or DOS command.com a painful experience, compared with modern shells and CLIs. Readline and editline are terrific, productivity-enhancing tools/libraries. Programmed completion in modern shells is just fabulous. I definitely see dramatic improvements compared with vanilla sh and even old ksh.
The one major feature that's missing from the CLI is the ability to switch between multiple sessions, but thankfully that's made easy thanks to screen, virtual terminals, multiple xterms, and tabbed terminals like the GNOME 2 terminal. Isn't that an area where GUIs have enhanced the CLI?
Marklar: marklar
The server running our family domain is an old SE/30. It runs totaly headless because the onboard video went out, the ram is maxed way past what you are supposed to be able to put in it, it runs MK linux, and at last count was hosting 15 domains. The surpizing thing is just how fast it is! I never notice any lag when I connect and I'm about 1500 miles away!
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
No doubt, the SR-71 is/was purty, but nothing ever has beat the record of the good old Gooney Bird.
So durable that eventually the FAA gave up and declared it exempt from end-of-life regulations.
So durable that some have been flown under combat conditions with a third of the wing blown off.
The only thirty year old cargo plane ever to be reconfigured as a combat gun platform (the Dragon, a.k.a. Spooky, a.k.a. Puff the Magic Dragon)
Rebuilt as a turboprop and outperformed new aircraft.
Left abandoned in a field of snow up past the Arctic Circle for an entire winter and then, dug out from under the snow, started up, and flown home.
No longer manufactured after 1946, still in use to this day.
The one, the only, The DC-3!
Yay!
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
It would collect Voyager's transmissions, and relay them back to us.
Not that it is a good thing. I have even seen newer Ford cars with push-rod engines(An engine configuration where the camshafts are located lower in the engine). Ok it was cheap, but really amazing since other mainstream cars have left that concept before 1986.
But maybe one day when Americans have to pay real money for gas, they will start looking at producing and buying cars with higher fuel efficiency. But until then, you'll excuse me if I keep my old Pontiac.
my sig
You bring up the idea that the CLI hasn't improved or been integrated with the GUI, but you completely ignore Emacs and the UI development that has gone on in Smalltalk and Lisp systems. A particularly striking example are the constraints-based GUIs - Ivan Sutherland first had this idea all the way back in his Sketchpad paper, and there have been multiple UI systems built afterwards on the principle (and I know of a new one that is being built right now), yet when was the last time you've even heard of constraints?
I find it depressing that all the wonderful techniques developed aren't being utilized, and some users think that because the systems they work with are based on 30 and 20 (even 20 years ago the X approach was considered a poor man's window system) year old paradigms there isn't anything else out there.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
The B-52 Stratofortress. Designed in the 40's, built in '52, could still be in service in the 2050's (over 100 years).
My Ensoniq Mirage DSK8 digital sampler. I got it in 1985 and still use it as my main controller keyboard today. Pretty cool system built around a Motorola 6805 CPU. While it doesn't quite have the specs of my modern gear, it's got its charm. I can still coax some mean sounds out of it too. Plus the digitally controlled analog filters in it rock. I made mods on it to pass other signals through the filter network.
Un-news
Bought it in 1981. And, what's more (*much* more), it's still in its second set of batteries. Amazing low power consumption.
First it changed music, then it changed the world! And to think it was created so that guitar players could be heard over their brass and percussion counterparts. Who's the loudest guy in the band NOW!? hehe
So with that in mind, I nominate the Great Wall of China, still standing after all these years. I think it qualifies whereas things like the Pyramids don't, in that they never served any real function. I bet the wall would still work pretty well today, if there was a war. Not perfect, but good.
If the goal was to pick classes of technologies, I think most of the responses here are exceptionally shortsighted. I think sail technology, the steam engine and the wheel had a lot more staying power, and who knew?
I think there are some good specific examples. Any real old bridges out there? Panama Canal is great, 'course it was designed to last a long time. I bet there are some irrigation ditches somewhere that were dug thousands of years ago, and still work. Stepped hillsides fall into that category, too. Most people who built them probably paid no heed to them lasting longer.
Pioneer is unique, because there was really no way to maintain it, and it was a 1 (or 2) shot deal. Those HP calcs are fine, but have more than 10% lasted this long? I'd love t hear about some scarecrow that's been scaring away crows for 200 years without a person laying his hands on it. What's the longest any manufactured item has lasted (and remained useful) for without human intervention? Kudos to the winner.
Millions made - more than any other rifle, ..
reliable... and to think Kalashnikov the
designer get no royalties
(Is this sort of an "Open Source" rifle
then? With anyone able to make them w/o
paying royalties?)
http://kalashnikov.guns.ru/models/ka50.html
http://ak-47.net/
http://www.sovietarmy.com/small_arms/ak-47.html
Granted, since we're no longer using mechanical typewriters, the reason for QWERTY isn't as compelling, but it was far better than anything else when it was devised, which made it the standard (at least in English-speaking countries) to this day.
Amen brother!
Always draw it out of them. NEVER beat it in to them.
Voice tone is EVERYTHING.
If they still can't do it when you're done, then it's YOUR fault. You're a LOUSY teacher. Go find something else to do.
Is it fascism yet?
During construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880's, it was discovered that the contractor for the cables was cheating and supplying crappy cables. There had been way too many cables already wound for it to be anything but a disaster to try to start over. It was decided that the design contained enough redundancy to stand despite the problem, and it's still in service with the defective cables today.
I'd have to say that the original GameBoy lasted far longer than was probably originally intended. The system was released in 1989 (!) and didn't get any major technology upgrades (aside from a color screen, and even that wasn't until the very late 90's) until maybe two years ago, with the release of the GameBoy Advance. And yet, somehow, Nintendo owns 95+ (maybe even 99+) percent of the handheld market. Interesting, no?
GameNerd: 100% Content. www.game-nerd.com
I have a Casio F-5 watch that is nearly 20 years old. It's one of the earliest LCD watches ever produced and does nothing but show the time. The amazing thing is that it's still running - with the same battery!
The band has rotted long ago and it's just sitting in my drawer, ticking away. It's even quite accurate. It had a y2k bug - it thought it was not a leap yer.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I bought this one shortly after they switched to the new design... It is much nicer, as the keys are much more durable. The only problem is that countless people have pressed the "LIGHT" button and "Illuminator" pseudo-button and asked, "What does that do?"
:^)
About switching batteries, next time buy a CR2032 instead of a CR2016 -- it will last much longer. The battery will fit into the watch case (with a tiny amount of force). According to the specs, the CR2032 has a capacity of 220 mAh, while the CR2016 only has a capacity of 90 mAh. The only physical difference is the height, of which the CR2032 is 3.2 mm vs. 1.6 mm for the CR2016. It will fit though, trust me.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware