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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?"
The Voyager Probe
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
The paper-ballot voting booth -- worked just fine for over 200 years...and then, one major screw-up in one state and everything goes to shit. Go figure.
blog |
My washer and dryer are almost 30 years old....
I have a Casio calculator (FX501p) still running happily after more than 22 years!
My Magic Eightball is great for answering questions from our sales department. Saves a lot of time on some of those questions that rely on actual thinking.
Both the tv and telephone are excellent examples of technology that seems to defy the ages. Esp. the good ole telephone. In this high tech age, it hasen't changed much (well at least from the end user perspective).
Still going strong after all these years, in some form or another.
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.
Although all I play on it is Karateka (sp?). That damn bird...
I got it in 1983.
..my liver.
Trolling is a art,
I never thought they's last.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
The FAA had a top flight (my pun) system 30 years ago. It's still running and they want to spend billions to upgrade it. The programmers have all retired (or jumped off of buildings in the dot.com bust).
Tisha Hayes
This is a pretty obvious one, but I think Linux has surpassed everyone's expectations, esp. those who knew about it in it's earlier stages. I'm sure Linus never expected it to become so huge, as well as a posterboy for the OSS movement.
My other sig is funny!
The Real Doll. That thing goes WAY beyond expectations!
Oh, wait, I dont think thats what you mean, was it...
hmm...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The x86 Processor. Created in 1982 with the unveiling of the all mighty 286 (both 8, 10 and 12Mhz speed demons).
:-)
Granted the main core has gone through some overhauls (Major ones include 486DX2, Pentium, P6 Core, K6, Athlon).
Seriously though, who would have thought it would hang in there for this long ?!
The design is very much the same as it was 100 years ago and, with the exception of fuel injection and emissions "add-ons", has changed very little in the last 50 years. With some of the V8 engines, manufacturers have been using the same block design for decades.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I made it out of a Charmin toilet roll and some tinfoil found on the street back in 1977. To this day I use it.
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 only paid $10 for it. I'm surprised it works at all.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Is it too much to expect a technology to last a few decades, rather than it being a shock?
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
As self-evident as it seems, note paper has stayed around way longer than I expected it to. It's a simple, cheap setup with the ultimate handwriting recognition system. If I want to write someting significant I'll open my word processor, but for quick little notes and calculations nothing will beat my pad of McGill notepaper.
And for planning things out and high-level organizational diagramming, I have yet to find a system that works better than a pad of Post-It notes and a roll of paper. We were promised papreless offices and homes years ago, and people were fortelling the end of Dead Tree books since the emergence of eBooks - but look around. I still see lots of paper on my desk.
We may have been told years ago that it was obsolete, but it's still the number one tool for many jobs.
Cue The Sun...
for what seems like decades now we've been hearing wild, utopian speculation regarding an endless stream of leg-covering technologies, each hailed as a 'pants-killer'. on seemingly a yearly basis, it seems, sony or microsoft or archer daniels midland trots out some promising technology to replace pants -- some intended to render not just the item but the entire pants PARADIGM obselete forever. but for all this new-fangledness, what's that on your ass, i ask you? huh!?!?
man, am i hung over.
god is just pretend.
Always remember the immortal rule of tech support: You couldn't do their job, don't expect them to do yours.
I remember when I was working as a summer intern doing desktop support for a rather large construction & engineering company. I was tagging along with a full-timer, and we walked into a rather large office where the guy I was with remarked "Heh-heh, you're gonna love this guy..stupid fool needed help defragging his HD".
Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in physics. Kind of humbled me right there and I realized he could probably learn my job in a month, where as I probably couldn't do his in a million years.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It started off just being a simple language for describing academic documents. Now you can plug so much junk into HTML that you can create whole applications. HTML is bursting at the seams because of all these hacks and extra languages tacked on to the end, but it still works. I think that's amazing.
this device has greatly exceeded my expectations
I don't use floppies for much more than install disks for linux anymore, so pretty much any disk I have rotting in the closet is fair game for a reformatting to serve as a boot disk. I've gone through stacks of disks, one goes bad, I toss it out and pick the next one on the stack.. except for this one ancient maxell floppy I have.
;)
I used it back when my parents got their 486 (in the early 90's) for holding windows 3.11, it was an OEM release and the first time you loaded the machine it prompted you through swapping disks to copy out recovery disks.
This disk has followed me in moving about the country four times now, it's gone from alaska to oregon to new jersey to california to illinois. Currently it's a boot disk for redhat 7.1, and I use it at work several times a week.
No it's not a 20 year old calculator, but considering most claim floppy disks have two year lifespans, the fact this is STILL my most reliable floppy makes it interesting. It even has the original "Windows 3.11 disk 8" label I wrote up for it on it, scribbled out. Underneath it is written "slackware #1" and "redhat boot".
They really don't make 'em like they used to.
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.
Hey just you wait until it comes back to destroy earth as VGER.
Users are like bacteria, each one creating a tiny problem until the host dies.
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 love my old Amiga 2000. It still does some things better than a damned PC. *sigh*
I've got this electric-synapse device in my skull that's been working terrific for over 23 years. And the original batteries that came with it still work! The only downside is the warrenty/insurance - it's a large monthly fee, but, hey, it's an expensive, fragile piece of equipment.
Rock!
With all the ways to capture information we have today, these two still are quite effective.
Other methods have more fidelity, but none have the simple human factors.
Guess I have to add paper to this list as well...
Blogging because I can...
Or how about Intel's shitty (for now) chip design based on a great (for then) 1970's design?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I'd say it exceeded its expectations. The floppy disk was originally invented by IBM as a way to insert code updates into mainframes (think flash rom but bigger). Computer scientists/engineers found it could make a handy portable storage media and the 3.5" disk that we use today is just an evolved, smaller version.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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)
The people who developed TCP/IP would have never thought it would be used as widely as it is now. ISO OSI stack was supposed to be the standard network protocol. But It failed miserably.
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.
>> My NES and SNES, some carts with battery-backed save still work
If the battery dies (it wont last more than 10 years max, my original Zelda gave it up not more than a year ago), it's a CR-2032 you can get for a buck at Radio Shack. The old ones welded into place, but it's easy to clip out. Replace it with an appropriate holder (another buck from RS) so it'll be easier to replace the next time. Hold the battery in tight with a bit of black tape, so it wont shake loose when you move the cart.
There's no reason an NES cart shouldnt last for 50 years if it's cared for. I'd say NES gets my vote too. I still play it more often than any other console.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They're pretty cool if you think about it. A whole bunch of ink that rolls out onto the paper over a tiny little ball. If you remember to keep the cap on and don't leave it on the dashboard of your car in the sun, it doesn't leak. And you can buy 12 for $1.00 at the office supply store, which if you didn't lose them all in a month would be a lifetime supply.
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.
Over 50 years after it was introduced, it's still in use...with a few slight changes of course.
The Aloha based system was not supposed to scale. The problem pointed out by IBM / TI and others were that collisons increased as the useage increased, prohibiting a steady throughput. The problem of non predictability of packages was equally mentioned.
Token ring and other methods were supposed to supplant Ethernet in a few years, back when we were at 1Mbps.
10Mbps were supposed to be the EOL for ethernet.
Where are we now? 10Gbps is getting to be deployed.
Help fight continental drift.
Am I the only one who notices that appliances and other electronic/mechanical devices from 15+ years ago seem to be MUCH better built than today's models? Sure, today's stuff is lighter, but that plastic seams to break much too easily. Give me a 30 year old blender that can crush ice in seconds over a new one that has a hard time with bananas anyday.
Somewhat analagous to the space program, eh? Pioneer, Voyager, etc.. much more longevity than anything that gets sent up these days.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Why Unix and C ofcourse ! Its really amazing that the creativity of one man (oh well, two men) is still going strong now (granted it had many overhauls). The entire concept of operating system has been influenced by Unix. We think processes and files. The beautiful simplicity and elegance! As far as C is concerned, the syntax and the semantics is elegant. (So elegant that I place semicolons at the end of sentences rather than a period).
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.
I still use mi Amiga 1200 and earn money with it!!!
(8 mb ram at 30 mhz...). Now it,s ancient technology..
Amazing =8-)
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.
Unless your old laptop burst into flames, if you have owned an Apple product, you understand that Macs are a hell of alot cheaper in the long run than any computer out there.
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.
Seriously! Given the number of times the "death of the paper document" was predicted
and the amount of "paperless office" ideas floated,
one must say that there is still nothing like good old hardcopy.
In fact, computers have increased the amount of paper used.
A rep. for a paper-mill I once visited said that the laser printer was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Computers are great for distribution. But they've got a long way to go
if they want to beat paper at (text) presentation.
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.
Actually the Voyager missions were extended in 1989 to last another ten or so years after now (to test the heliopause with the magnatometer) and then after that point to do some measurement of interstellar space. Both Voyager I and II were designed with longevity in mind partly for the possibility for VIM missions.
Voyager proves you can get bang for your buck if you plan for the long term...
crazy dynamite monkey
IMNSHO
The best selling computer ever, the Commodore64 will live forever.
It taught more people to how to write programs than any other too. It rewarded learning hexadecimal. It rewarded the user learning how to program hardware registers, which now seems a lost art, alas...
Then was born the Amiga series. Amiga sported a futuristic OS with hardware to match. Amiga did all that is kewl in home computing first.
These Commodore sold computers did it all: Better, faster, cheaper, AND for much much _longer_ than its competition -- even now.
64's and Amigas run all night and day and have rocked the world for decades now. Thats a long lllloooonnnnnggggg time, and I get off on it!
These classics are backed a next generation: AmigaOS4, The AmigaOne, The C-One Omnilator: these should prove just as durable.
I say "You can never kill everything of Commodore."
*(And hopefully Bernies mighty Umithlon too!)
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
When microwaves first came out, people thought of them as a new way of cooking the same old foods, quicker. Nice, but not earth-shattering. Since then, though, microwaves have spawned a whole new kind of cooking. Whole supermarket aisles are full of products that have been specially formulated to be microwave-friendly, or that wouldn't exist at all without the microwave. People's lifestyles have changed because of the microwave. If you looked around at all the gadgets in the average person's house, you'd be hard pressed to find more than a couple whose absence would be more keenly felt than the microwave...the computer, the TV, the phone. All of those were expected to be revolutionary though, so they haven't exceeded expectations as the title asks. The microwave has had a much more profound effect than expected.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I grew up on 5.25" floppies. Never could figure out why they decided to carry the name "floppy" over to the 3.5" 'hard discs', as they were anything but floppy. And then to add to the confusion, they came up with fixed disk drives, and called them "hard disks". Were they TRYING to confuse us? But look at it... we've been in a "magnetic media" age for what, over 30 years now. (anyone remember "drum" or "core" memory?) We were suppsed to be using crystals or holograms or isolinear chips or those spiffy colored rectangles in STTOS by now. I think the tech is getting about played out, it's time for something new.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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).
A free knockoff of a 30-yr-old OS is the "latest thing from the 'bazaar' of great ideas". I think it's really Unix that is exceeding expectations, in its Linux avatar.
I just find it depressing that, as good as the ideas embodied in Unix were 30 years ago, they haven't been dramatically surpassed, perhaps two or three times, over a time span in which hardware performance has offered four or five *orders of magnitude* increase in power.
The GUI probably counts as one, but it's not as if the CLI itself has improved dramatically (except in performance), or the GUI and CLI have joined forces to dramatically increase the power of the combination. The closest you get is running a GUI to do GUI-only things and to open several simultaneous windows in which you can do 30-yr-old CLI-only things.
I guess a technology can exceed expectations by virtue of the fact that no significant improvement has occurred in years.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.. =)
Turning enemy countries into parking lots since 1952.
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b52-s trat/b52info.html
Depends on what you mean by good. If you mean the Darwinian sense, then yes, it's phenomenally successful.
However, you write like a person who has never had to work under the 8086 real mode in assembly language. Here are a few things wrong with it (the whole family, over the years):
- Too few registers
- Registers have special purposes, and are
not generic enough
- Many instructions are very rarely used
- Did not have a supervisor mode (pre 386)
or MMU support
- Unbelievably lame 16-bit segmentation
- Overcomplicated memory protection (few
if any OSes take advantage of segmentation)
These are design failings that are not "in the eye of the beholder". Intel overcame the first two by going to a hidden RISCy core with many more registers, the third by implementing many rarely used instructions in microcode, the next two by essentially discarding the 8086 and 80286 architectures in going to the 80386. Intel deserves a lot of credit, but they had to work very hard to overcome these problems.Comparing it to the 68000 is left as an exercise for the reader.
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
Initially, yes. However, it lasted this long because Intel worked very hard to keep it alive. If the x86 trailed, for example, the PowerPC-based Macintosh by 50% in performance, many things may be very different.
Had that not happened, x86 would be at best a footnote, along with the 65XX, Z80, etc.
The 6502 and Z-80 are not "footnotes". They deserve prominent spots in CPU history marking the beginning of personal computing and affordable gaming consoles. When the x86's time finally comes, it will also be a major milestone marking the maturing of personal computing.
... 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...
I still play (occasionally)
//e is so freaking small.
Ultima III, Ultima IV, Karateka,
Deadline (I still havent beat that
damn game! INFOCOM>>>>> DAMN YOU)
Snakes (still better on the Apple
than on my phone), What was the
name of that tank game? Battlefield
or something (they remade it recently),
Bolo, and of course I have all
the Original Bard's Tales (1-3) and
the AD&D Character Creator Disk.
Those were the days..... I have
Appleworks as well but the keyboard
on the Apple
I just bought (last year) a complete
Apple IIc with the monitor, mouse,
external disk and carrying case. Sweet
deal.
The Apple Newton is, in my opinion, a great example of technology living beyond its expected lifetime and abilities:
There's a very strong and active user community, plenty of help, and gobs of software. An incredibile amount of work has been poured into the device with addons like wireless networking, CompactFlash ATA support, Shoutcast and MP3 playing, web serving, and desktop synching. All this adds to the Newton's built in PIM, notetaking, and email support.
I use my Newton for a telnet client, guitar tuner, notepad/to-do lister, and MP3 player.
The first usable Newton was put out in 1996 and the most powerful and expandable Newton was released middle of 97. The thing's lived a long life and looks like its gonna keep on chugging for a long time more, expecially since they can be found for just over $100 on eBay and the continued support of the Newton community. I know I won't ever ditch it.
My girlfriend is the front desk manager at a hotel. From what she has told me, I feel that people take NO initiative when it comes to doing anything. If you find someone who is willing to take initiative, they're probably worth a few magnitudes of their weight in gold.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
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.
The drying of a cheese-based mixture that, when combined with boiled, complex carbohdrates makes something relied upon by Men and students all over the world.
Ah, Kraft Mac & Cheese....
You might want to sit down for this.
I once knew a Ph.D. who called saying that his "CD-ROM" drive wasn't working right and that it messed up his CD. No problem, I'll be over shortly to check it out. Then, I got to thinking, "He doesn't have a CD-ROM drive!!!"
Sure enough, the guy tried to put a CD in a 5 1/4" Floppy Drive. The drive actually tried to read the CD! It messed up his CD and the drive! I couldn't decide if I should smack him or just laugh until I couldn't breathe.
OH, BUT IT GETS BETTER!
His Ph.D. was in Computer Science!!! I kid you not!!!
The man was just too smart to get out of the RAIN and had the common sense of a rock.
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
My trusty old Mercedes 190E (2 liter injection powered engine), built in the 1st year of production (1984), they made these for like 10 years. It still kicks all of my friends cars asses, muhahaha. But I live in Europe... The other has to be the telephone line I guess. I live in Belgium and these lines are lying here for like more than 50 years. It reaches 3.3Mbit today and the future only looks brighter, not to mentions those lucky scandinavians. I'm using TV cable (8Mbit), but still...
With a half-life of 24,000 years, it takes a lickin' and still keeps you from tickin'.
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
That, my friend, is because the only things that are still around from 30 years ago are the ones that were durable. In another 30 years, people will say the same thing about today's things, because the crap will already be broken and disposed of. Sure, there will be millions of Huffy bicycles in the trash. But people will have forgotten them, and will marvel at the amazing durability of the high-end Treks and whatnot that survive.
And the space program differences are all about cost. The Pathfinder mission (which landed on mars) was part of the Discovery series of missions, capped at $150 million. Cassini, the last of the Voyager/Pioneer-type "heavy engineering" designs cost $3.4 BILLION. Pioneer 10 cost $350 million, in 1970. Voyager 1 and 2 cost $875 million together, in 1977. (those obviously need some inflation adjustment to be fair to a 1996 mission, but even Pioneer is more than double the cost without adjustment!) Of course there's going to be a performance difference when you pay many times as much. Even so, Galileo (another old-school nasa design) cost $1.6 billion, and its main antenna never opened. Would you rather have 10 cheap missions where 8 fail, or one expensive mission that fails?
Sure, we've lost lots of recent mars missions. But all added together, they barely cost as much as some of those single probes.
Links:
pioneer cost
cassini cost
voyager cost
pathfinder cost
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
OK, it's not especially geeky, although I could cite a recent Simpsons reference if necessary.
Leo Fender probably didn't 100% invent the bass guitar, but probably is close enough in so many essential details. The first Fender "Precision" bass guitars were meant to make road gigs easier, and were also designed to be played by a guitarist doubling as a "bass" player. The earlier models (before mid 60's) had a "finger rest" so that the fingerpicking guitarist could play a bass line with his thumb - the finger rest eventually migrated to a new position and became the "thumb rest".
Fender also didn't really invent guitar amps, but the various Fender models are still a standard. Basically they just took standard designs out of the RCA applications books, put them in a really heavy duty box, and rock music as we know it today evolved around those amplifiers.
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..
The humble paperclip.
From a history of the paperclip on about.com:
"Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, since Norway had no patent laws at that time. Johan Vaaler was an employee at a local invention office when he invented the paperclip. He received an American patent in 1901 -- patent abstract "It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions." Johan Vaaler was the first person to patent a paperclip design, although other unpatented designs might have existed first."
Over 100 years old and still going strong...
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
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.
Starting as a mere communications and education system, it has evolved into a multibillion dollar entertainment, marketing and anti-privacy engine, becoming a huge single point-of-failure that could collapse the world's economy within days.
Who woulda thunkit.
No, this is not sarcasm or irony. The software that runs the Space Shuttles, to this day, was written in the early 70s. The computers they're running on, IBM AP-101s, were designed in the 60s. There have been a few upgrades over the years but nothing major, e.g. in 1992 they went from magnetic disks to solid state storage. The guts of the system, 400,000 lines of HAL/S, remain the same. NASA has no plans to change that, either; the software just works too well. The difference being able to read gyro data at 1000 times a second with 1960s hardware, versus 10,000,000 a second with today's, is meaningless. Statistically, the software has <1 bug, and none that impact the performance. Basically, it's perfect, and it will continue to exist as long as the shuttles themselves do. (Speaking of outlasting your design, NASA recently decided that the shuttles wouldn't be replaced until 2020, meaning that they could theoretically be launching a 40-year airframe some day. That's older than any school bus you ever rode on, and your school bus wasn't being frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs, and torched to 2500 degrees, six times a year, either.)
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I'd be interested in a make and model of a high quality cordless phone.
Wouldn't bluetooth work pretty well for household cordless phones? I can't remember if the range is good enough or not.
Every cordless I buy stinks. I've stayed away from 2.4 GHz just because I don't like it fuzzing out while someone uses the microwave and all the 900 MHz phones I buy either have crappy quality or don't answer half the time when you hit the magic "talk" button.
Does anyone have a high quality recommendation?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I don't fault this PhD guy for not knowing how to defrag a hard drive, but I don't necessarily think its all that impressive that he has a PhD and does NOT know how to defrag a hard drive!!!
Defragging a HD is not an obvious concept. Hell, on a decently designed system, one should never have to invoke a defragger!
But it doesn't seem to occur to everyone here, than most physics PhD's never use windows. Why use windows when you can use UNIX? The guy has probably used UNIX all his academic life, simply because that is what we use in academia. So he uses a Windows box for the first time, and hasn't heard of defragging or know how to do it. Big deal.
This year is the 30th anniversary of what we now think of as hard drives, i.e. a sealed box containing the heads and platters, as opposed to separate removable platter stacks.
While many people have said for years that the Winchester drive design would run out of steam "any year now", it has continued to achieve greater and greater areal density with reasonable reliability and steadily decreasing price.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
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.
I own 3 Hammond Organs, and nothing digital sounds as good. The latest Roland vk-7 organs come close, but no cigar. The combination of electromechanical tone generation and tube amplification is unbeatble. Unfortunately they weigh a few hundred pounds each. I just played on an organ dated from 1947, and it was the warmest sounding instrument I have ever touched. Sweet.
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.
My laymen's guess is that it would go at least as fast as voyager, and would therefore be even costlier to launch, as it wouldn't be able to use the beneficial effect of being accelerated by the planets it passes as it would have to go in the same direction as voyager is now, and its too soon for the planets to be in the same positions.
Also, I guess voyager isnt collecting all that much usefull info as its information gathering devices werent built to "read" the info in deep space
(excuse the spelling errors, Im a bit drunk)
My parents' washing machine was one of the first front loaders - it's still washing 23 years later.
Their Ferguson VHS deck is still working 20 years on too.
Their Windows based PC broke after a year.
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
It is still the stand by which all new technologies are measured.
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.
Invented more than 100 years ago and still going strong.
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.
Yeah, actually, I've often found that people holding advanced degrees are incredibly dim-witted when it comes to operation of common electronic devices.
Perhaps it's a case of "tunnel vision" to an extent. It takes so much time and effort to master physics and earn a PhD in it - those doing so haven't spent much time working with the devices in the "real world"?
After all, getting one's head around quantum mechanics and all the hypotheticals of matter vs. anti-matter is pretty far from such concepts as H.D. defragging and mastering navigation of a Windows operating system.
(My own father is a PhD in physics and I see this with him all the time. He can barely use the mouse, and finds GUI's extremely frustrating - because things aren't strictly rule-based. I think he vastly prefers a command line based system where specific commands entered in exact ways give specific results.) He finds it odd that programs don't always have consistent menus with the quit/exit or print options in the same places each time. He wants to know why you click the Windows "START" button when you want to shut down the system (or log out). For that matter, he wants to know why the program menu button is labeled START - when that generally connotates a function performed to power on a system. I tell him "you just have to play around with it and you'll catch on to it" - but he wants something written out with clear, concise rules. Step 1, step 2, step 3, etc.
I bought them my first year in college about twenty years ago when I was doing a lot of skiing. I replaced the wool liners about five years ago.
They have remained perfectly waterproof, and my feet have never, not once, ever been cold while wearing them.
Not very high tech but worthy of mention in this thread.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
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 toaster from that era too. It was a wedding gift to my grandparents. I still use it several times a week, with no complaints at all. However, when it DOES finally die, I'm going to send a stern letter off to the makers of it. It's a Toastmaster made by McGraw Electric Co. Sadly there is no date on it. It makes use of patent 1,923,590 and others though. On top of it's age and reliablitly, it happens to be one of those nicely curved chrome ones that look really cool. :)
Michael
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.
The SR-71 certainly is a design that's stood the test of time. But it's a relative newcomer compared with the granddaddy of all combat aircraft, the B-52. It first flew in the 1950s, and is still going strong.
[this
I regularly use my Faber Castell Dramstadt slide rule (67/54R)with Mechanical additator on the back and a Commodore Minuteman Calculator purchased in 1971. I picked both up at a garage sale for AU$2
Built for the International Exhibition of 1889, it was supposed to be destroyed in 1909. I am pretty sure Mr. Eiffel would never have hoped it would last more than a century.
It is a very good example of steel architceture (Art ?) which boosted the architecture creativity in the 19th century.
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