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Problems in Computer Conservation
sobachatina writes "The Computer museum at The University of Amsterdam has an interesting page with examples of the problems that they run into maintaining 20+ year old hardware such as rubber rollers from card readers melting or mold growing inside CRT terminals.I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!"
This has never been a problem for the folks down at Not@Home cable internet servce.
Just check out their state-of-the-art equipment!
tcd004
for going solid state all the way.
I work as tech support, and the other day I opened up a computer case. I thought the dust bunny in there the size of my fist was a rat at first and figured it was about to jump out and bite me.
The problems for future computers are going to be worse! Ewwwww!
I'm fairly certain that enough particles have wafted in for some really nice little pot trees to be growing in my CPU by now...
I am Law! You are Crime!
Why don't they just buy newer computers instead of putting up with that old garbage? You may say blah blah blah rich American blah blah, but even something five years old would be much better than old junk. As they say in the 2nd Wind exercise equipment commercial, "why buy new when slightly used will do?"
AR
They should stop running their webservers on the antique computers. Then they would last longer...and maybe they wouldn't be /.'d already.
Making a computer that will last for centuries?
Suck the air out of the exhibits and you'd probably be able to preserve those exhibits a little bit longer.
And if all else fails, take a picture and put it up when the original machine has fallen to pieces.
I have been pwned because my
Maybe the slashdotting has blown all the cobwebs off their equipment (as well as warming up the spiders a little) ;-)
I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!
That's when you know it's time to buy an lcd.
"solid state all the way"
My homebrew amplifier is using 2A3 tubes from the 1930's, I don't see a problem.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well, about 10 years ago a ct brought in an old IBM PC that was used for some type of server apps. It had stopped working and the ct wanted us to fix it. I removed the cover and it was not just A dust-bunny. The whole interior was completly covered in a dust-mat. I used some compressed air to blow it clean and then a vacuum-cleaner to remove the rest and applied some electronic cleaner. The PC started right up again, ct happy, me charged them big bucks :)
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Did anybody else misread that headline and think it was about IPV6?
I have a number of fairly old systems (up to about 28 years), and so far they are all chugging along quite well. My TRS-80 Model I still works great for instance - drives are functional, etc. Not that I use it much, but I boot it once every few months.
:)
But I'm sure this won't last forever... maybe I should get my valuable data off the thing one of these days
Interestingly enough, the old technology is not considered the best, at least not as a backup medium. This is the thing most of the preservation efforts go and should go into.
:)
Admitted, paper lasts very long, there is enough ancient evidence
But look e.g. here http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa13.htm,
they say that CD-Rs last 50-200 years(!)
Compare that to magnetic tapes, discs, etc.
But the final solution for very important data may well be the engraving into gold-plated aluminium, as the NASA did it for pioneer 10...
It seems that mechanically changed media (stones, CD recordables etc.) have the longest lifetime.
My boss brought in his laptop.
... eventually he left the lcd, and never saw him again. Either he found his way out of the laptop, or got electrocuted.
There was an ant crawling around INSIDE the lcd. You could see him running around
Just wait until a current Pentium 4 is 20 years old. The dust will be an inch thick on the inside of the case...
Just a few years ago. Not because It didn't do what I wanted it to. In fact I rather miss it because it was ideally suited to its task, but because various little mechanical bits of it started to get wonky and I couldn't find replacements.
I'll be able to custom build a replacement now with the new VIA stuff, and the replacement will undoubtably be "better" than the Compaq, but it's still just plain annoying to have to take a grand or so out of pocket to replace something that did it's job ( and that I only payed $50 for in the first place) and could have continued to do so ad infinitum had a few $5 parts been available.
And of course its basically working carcass is now sitting in some landfill because none of the local shops even considered it worth taking up space if I gave it to them for free.
And this could still be a continuing issue. One of the surest ways to force DRM "enabled" machines on the majority of the populace is to simply phase out the bits of the machines people already have making them impossible to keep going.
It might take 20 years, but businesses seem to find the patience they otherwise lack when it comes to ways to grind down the consumer to the level they desire.
KFG
... It just wouldn't seem right without the simulation of the capacitor "popping" in an old VT100. I saw this happen and a little mushroom cloud formed over the top of the terminal. I had to walk over and unplug it as the young woman at the key board wouldn't go back near it.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I've solved my 'dirty keyboard' syndrome by purchasing black ones.
I used to put 'em through the dishwasher.
Works like a charm.
(just remember to remove the circuitry, m'kay?)
how about the opposite?
;-P
plug the thing up the net, pay some cobol programmer to write a server, then put a wish fulfillment story on slashdot to the effect of "proven: microsoft stole source code from linus" or "proven: mp3 pirating good for the economy" and then watch the poor old decrepit things melt or explode.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Heh. When I installed my new master hard drive recently, I ended up having to peel off dust. It was caked between the heat sink and the fan, slowing down the fan and completely blocking airflow across the heatsink. My average CPU temp dropped from 60 to 40 degrees after I peeled it off.
...looked like the front rotors on my old 'university' car.
squeeeeeeee-gggrrrrrr!
I still have the "nanosecond" I received from Grace Hopper dinner she spoke at in Milwaukee. I wonder how many of these are still around?
Probably about a billion.
def: nanosecond: wire approx 11.98 Inch long, if you don't know why already then you wouldn't be interested.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
1.: They can. They are not using these computers for their daily work. Are you kidding?!
2.: You have probably seen enough of these boxes and stuff so you won't go into a computer museum. But others haven't, are interested, and they go.
3. There is sometimes older scientific data, still of relevance, that has to be recovered.
I was de-bugging a radio stations computer system that wasn't playing music (no music == bad) so I had to crawl over the on-air console and go behind the built in furniture. My GOD! HUGE lumps of dust, and wire... running... everywhere and nowhere at the SAME TIME! It turns out the problem was a home-made null-modem cable connecting the scheduling computer with the playing computer (most important systems in the station, responsible for playing all music over the air) was resting under the UPS they had back there. I'm trying to keep things cleaner now. Less wires that dont run anywhere (hell, I think I remember hearing there was 120v Live not connected to anything just laying there) and more vacuming (less dust). Systems turn to SHIT when you don't activly watch over them.
Google's Cache
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
There have been some interesting discussions about this kind of thing on alt.computers.folklore recently; it might be worth checking out for those who want a more hard-core technical discussion. Myself I prefer to use emulators and avoid aging issues entirely, but then my apartment's too small to indulge in antique hardware...
o Keeping old hardware alive
o Keeping old CPU's alive
(In addition to this stuff, USENET of course has a number of groups dealing with specific older hardware.)
Hemp (the fiber of which used to make rope, and the leaves of which is used make hippies & the early BSD's) paper can last 1,500+ years
2. A museum should contain items that are interesting to others. How many would venture into a junkyard of mold computers to look at the "exhibits?"
I just took a postdoctoral position in the Netherlands, and my office is one floor above this Computer Museum, as I discovered only a couple weeks ago (and now I realise why my network connection has been slow for much of the day...). I think the exhibits are quite fascinating, and give enormous insight into how computing was done thirty years ago. It really gives one an appreciation for how much computing has changed---not merely the technology, but the approach to doing computer science. So there's one person anyway, though I didn't come to look at the mold in particular.
3. Perserving crap serves no purpose. Why not start a museum of Gremlins, Pintos, Festivas, Yugos... (See my other posts)
Well there's a brilliant argument. By that measure, historical (as opposed to artistic or natural) museums would be largely empty, precisely because most of the artifacts therein were perfectly ordinary, everyday items. What you call crap, may well be a priceless treasure for an archaeologist ten centuries hence, attempting to glean some insight into the dawn of the machine era. It seems laughable now, as it no doubt would if you had told a potter in the early Bronze age that is work would be considered a valuable treasure thousands of years hence.
Mouser
---I looked in once and thought it was some sort of voodoo monitor ray insulation. This explains the critters that walk in and out of it, too, I guess....
oh well, thank goodness there's ebay recycling!
Okay, we WILL be leaving behind mountains of trash that future cultures will probably be mining for raw materials.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
If they think mold inside a CRT is bad, wait until they try to scrape the pile of molten silicon from the floor of their server room after slashdot's done with it.
Old data is not the same as worthless. Say they did census work on punch cards back in the 60's. Just because its old does not make data worthless. The equipment may be, but its the data you care about.
Mod point free since 2001
I have a bunch of old computing machinery, all of it in working condition, I collect arcade games. Most of the ones I have are from the early 80s, Tempest, Robotron 2084 and Xevious among others. Time takes its toll, but luckily when you are working on stuff that old, it is readily fixable with a soldering iron, a wire brush, and some patience. Big chips = easy soldering. All of the games I have work perfectly, and will stay that way. You just have to be careful, and a bit creative, and you should have no long term problems.
-Charlie
Hell, I have enough problems trying to keep monitors from melting inside. Even keeping them out of sunlight, in a cool place, away from heat vents, and not covering them they still eventually melt their boards. I see it every day in the used computer biz.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Though strange that the arabs think he's undead. He always did have that zombie personality...
sounds like the hampster powering the computer fell off it's wheel.
$cat
CD-Rs use an organic dye which reacts to the recording laser in a CD-R burner, causing it to melt and pit--it then becomes non-translucent and the reading laser is refracted when it attempts to read those portions of the disc.
:P
There are several known cases of bacteria and fungus attacking this organic dye, not including the obvious danger that heat and sunlight pose to it.
"Regular" CDs use a polycarbonate substrate instead which is literally stamped into the CD during an injection moulding process. THIS is a mechanical change, giving the advantage that a stamped CD could very well last 50-200 years, whereas a burned CD-R that is not hermetically sealed will be lucky to last 10-20.
It seems that what we need is an inorganic hybrid of a stamping machine and a CD-R burner, something that can (using a much more powerful laser) physically inscribe the bits into a polycarbonate-like material. The nice thing about a technology like this being adopted, is that the firmware could be modified to allow the same machine to create CDs, DVDs, and whatever else they throw at us within that form-factor. Even better would be the ability to come up with your own (Open Source?) disc data storage format.
Anyone want to play devil's advocate on that idea? Apart from cost, I could see consumables and waste being an issue.
Jason Fisher
Yeah, I know the feeling. One day I had some spare time at work so I thought I'd see if I could figure out what was wrong with my HPUX C360's scsi drives as it just stopped working one day.
I pull the guts of the machine out, and a dead mouse falls out. I felt bad for the little guy, these things get really warm inside. I would of felt worse had he not crapped and pissed all over the scsi controller IC.
Needless to say, I spend a little time after replacing the IO board patching any mouse sized holes in the back of the machine.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
"It seems laughable now, as it no doubt would if you had told a potter in the early Bronze age that is work would be considered a valuable treasure thousands of years hence."
I've got a bag of SIMM sticks I wanna sell ya. And if they aren't considered valuable in one thousand years, I'll double your money back!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Actually the metre was originally defined as a part of an arc travelling from the North Pole to the equator via Paris. In more recent times, it has been defined as the distance that light travels in a vacum in a certain time period (specified by caesium oscillations). The capacity definition follows the length definition.
Seems like a big 'duh' today, but at the time it was revolutionary. As was her assembler.
-
When I was a kid I found my dad's old (Texas Instruments, I think) calculator. It had a one line red VFD display and was almost the size of a brick (it weighed sligtly less). I also found a little book of magnetic strips (about the size of a stick of gum). The calculator had a little slot in the left and right sides. You could load "programs" into the calculator by inserting the strip in one side of the calculator and a little motor with a rubber wheel attached would pull it through and spit out the other side. If you were lucky, it had read the strip right and loaded your program.
Well, after about a dozen of these loads the little rubber wheel attached to the motor fell off, no more contact with the strips. I tried tons of things, tape, pieces of plastic, shaved down washers, nothing worked. I was quite sad when I had to throw it away, it was a fun little toy. I'm sure that now, being older, I could have fixed it. Maybe if I had kept it and fixed it I could still be using it to this day.
These things wear out and break down but I think if you have enough time, money and resources you could probably keep them going forever.. But, is it worth it? For me it would have been... for the sentimental value.
Geoffeg
Actually the length of a meter is based on something. 1 cubic centimeter of water is exactly one mililiter. So 100 mililiters are exactly one cubic meter.
Difference between a line and a cube.
If I take 100 cm^3 end to end, I get a box 1cmx1cmx100cm. This is the same as 0.01mx0.01mx1m. This is not quite the same as a m^3, which would be 100cm^3x100cm^3x100cm^3. When I do the math, I get 1x10x6 cm^3/m^3 (1000000cm^3/m^3) So we have 1000000ml/m^3. This means that we have 1000 liters per cubic meter.
As to imperial vs metric-- metric is nice when it comes to dividing by 10 (or to be fair 2-- once-- or 5). This makes doing scientific measurements easy for the simple reason that we normally use a base 10 number system. The imperial system is designed around the numbers 2 and 3 and is designed so that numbers can be repeatedly multiplied or divided by 2 and 3. this makes it easier to cut a recipie in half or in thirds (rather than, say to 30%).
That would be ideal would be if we switched to duodecimal as our number system and created a metric system based on 12 (which is, after all, 2x2x3).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That is (or at least was, before stations went all robot all the time) a major problem with radio station control rooms, it's a major hassle to dust and vacuum while somebody's doing an air shift, especially when you have to be careful not to suck up one of those temporary repairs that have been hanging out the back of some piece of equipment for the last 20 years (and of course it was installed by an engineer who's been gone almost that long and never documented anything anyway).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I read that the Smithstonian museum was actually trying to preserve food like Big Macs for posterity. Imagine, 1000 years from now future generations might not have a clue what a Big Mac or a can of coke looked like. Everyday objects like vaccum tube radios and LPs vanish almost before you notice.
My rights don't need management.
My strangest was baby mice. Popped a PC (DEC rainbow) open in my shop and saw these little squirming hairless fetuses, it freaked me right out.
Ah, the good old days. Think I'll go try to find Thayer's Quest on Ebay.
Stop and consider the common mode failure: plastic or rubber failed in every case. What does that tell you about your plastic CD or tape substrate and the readers? Cermaic and glass last all else returns to dust sooner than later. The infamous NPR archive tape case, where ultra expensive tapes failed well before anyone expected is a case in point. You might be able to make a special ceramic CD, but the reader would fail and have to be reconstructed. The best prospects for long term data survival is still human readable monuments.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I mean, really. Your nick is only different to "Anonymous Coward" by one character, and I still didn't misread that.
This deserves to be modded, but not +Funny. Did anyone else read that as -1, Dummy?
Can you tell that I'm bitter about my recent experiences with dead or dying slot one and socket 370 boards and various VGA monitors?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Put a small offcut of a pet flea collar somewhere in the bag of your laptop (camera especially) as well as a bag of Silica Gel. The Silica keeps the damp out, and the flea collar kills the creepy crawlies as soon as they come near (or deters them, I care not which).
Only a centimetre should be enough. Any more it would make the bag stink. Put it somewhere you won't accidentally touch it.
Consider this: In my business, people are using machines as old as 30 years and some may be quite a bit older than those. These machines have everything from punch card readers to tape readers to special floppy drives that are impossible to find nowadays. And of course, these parts go bad, and as luck would have it in this industry, replacing one of these pieces of machinery can completely break a business. Especially with the economy doing as badly as it is now, and manufacturing is at such a low that everybody in this industry is suffering. But I digress.
The point I'm trying to make is this: If these things (CRTs with mold, rubber wheels melting, etc) are critical to the operation of a really old computer, then someone needs to manufacture them, just like people still manufacture replacement parts for old cars. This is most likely a better idea than replacing these systems with new ones for the following reason: These old systems are proven. A lot was invested into making them reliable and whatever bugs exist are well known by now. Replacing these systems would introduce problems for a long time to come... problems like software not working properly, which is a problem that management has a very difficult time accepting. Try telling your boss that some buffer wasn't flushed and therefore $50,000 just went down the drain. A rubber wheel melting and being replaced is a lot easier to explain to one's manager because everybody knows what a rubber wheel is. And how much does a rubber wheel cost? Even if it has to be specially manufactured and costs the end user $100.00, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than re-engineering the whole damn computer network. And putting up with stupid management (of which I am a member) giving you shit because three months have passed and the new computer network STILL isn't operational due to some stupid SQL program or perl script that has yet to be written, and we've gone ahead and ordered that rubber wheel anyway.
Negra Modelo. Me llamo Juanito Rodriguez y soy alcoholico.
1. In Polytech museum in Moscow there is an interesting collection of computers since 60th. Very worth visiting. Ural, Mir - first russian personal computer made circa 1970, Nairi, stuff with magnetic cards, etc.
2. Vacuum tubes greatly survive electro magnetic impulses that arise from nuclear blasts and special weapons.
Hmm. I maintain old computers...I don't have to, but I do. I can also spell 'arguments'. I submit, using your logic, that you are flaming dumb ass.
Electromechanical gear from the 1960s often still works. Working cash registers and jukeboxes from the 1940s and 1950s aren't that rare.
It's getting worse as gates get smaller, too. Transistors used to last for many decades; now a decade is a good run.
Get a log in, punk mofo, and post with some face!
If you look at your modern computer the technology is still basically the same as from 30 years ago. CRT's still use the same basic princible. Hard disks are smaller but still have heads. If anything I would say that hard disks are worse in that you can only get a years guarentee on some now.
So what happens 30 years from now when my Athlon is sitting in the museum. Will they still have to clean out my keyboard? I expect so. Also what about a hard disk head crashing? Yup still would. So I ask what do we need to do now to make sure that we still can access our data in 30 years?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
It's not quite a computer, but in my ham radio days a
few roaches made a nest inside my transmitter. You
could see them as they crawled across the frequency
display window. Once in a while one would try to cross
the tuning capacitor and get fried. The odor was unique.
The problem goes beyond specific aging hardware. It's also about keeping access to current software or even art. Here is the introduction for this column. "This article raises an interesting question: how can we preserve access to all the digital contents we are creating today. As you all know, technologies evolved -- and fast. How will you read an e-mail or an MP3 file twenty years from now? Maybe in a museum, maybe nowhere." On art conservation, you can read "Art restoration and Technology: Two cultures united."
Here is another link with pictures of some messed up hardware. In this case it was mainly due to user error, but it's amazing what people will do to those poor machines. My favorites are people who mailed motherboards in the original store-display box, and those who put memory in backwards.
Check out Chad's News
Mechanisms are repairable, metal, plastic etc. can be reproduced. It's the chips and storage mediums that cause the real problems, tapes start to flake and chips fail. It's becomes like old cars, just like you end up scrapping one or two computers to fix another one.
A couple of items that I still use:
1. An Acer keyboard, (Model 6512, Circa 1994) I am typing on it right now. This thing is built like a brick and I happened on it when by workplace gave away all the pre-Y2K computers to the employees. Much stronger than an old IBM keyboard and built to last. It just happens to have an ATX plug on it. When I snapped a Ctrl key on a much more modern keyboard playing a game, I picked this thing up off the pile of old equipment because it was the only thing that would work with my modern computer. I still am using it to this day even though it has major grunge problems. It still shows no signs of wear.
2. Packard Bell monitors, These things are tough and again, built to last. 17" 1024x768 and still works great! I finally gave it up only because I was getting fragged because of the low resolution. I plan on using it for my Linux server down the road.
My point is that these items were used when I got them, did yoeman's service while I used (still use) them and will be around for a long, long time.
I don't consider having a "Windows" button a reason to give up my keyboard. Sure, it has a Num-lock light that will not shut off (Due to an incompatability with modern motherboards) but other than that it is very solid.
at the shop I used to work at, they got in this laptop. slowly dying, couldn't figure it out.
tip it side to side, and a distinct slurshing sound.
Open it up and find Urine, the whole thing was full of Bunny urine from the customers pet bunny.
The kicker is it took a few days for it to go out and they continued to use it.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
So many Amigas have been killed by crap leaking from batteries, it soaks into multi-layer boards aand dissolves tracks where you can't get at them.
Add to that things like capacitor electrolytes, and I think the only place we're going to be able to maintain old computers is as VMs, such as Amiga Forever.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
And you think Stonehenge is the site of some bronze age rave or something right?
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Far saner to code to a VM that will continue to work on future hardware and keep storage abstracted. My mainframe friend always tells me they still use punch-card readers, only they don't exist physically any more. Kind of of like how tar writes to "tape drives" that don't exist either, we have phased out tape for desktop backs, but the software is the same.
I maintain some really old thermal wax colour printers that have crumbling rubber wheels and it *sucks*: The consumables cost a ton, parts are extortionately priced, they are flakey compared to new printers, they have crummy DPI and they are sloooowwwwwww...... First decent budget I get, they are all going to die. Because I am going to replace one colour postscript printer with another, no-ones even going to notice (except it'll be faster, cheaper and better).
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
A real live furry mouse living in nice warm computer that has some of the slot covers at the back missing.
And we wondered why the fan was so noisy.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I have a slight problem with baby spiders at the moment, and I'd kill them if it weren't that I think they might fix the other slight (?) problem with mosquitos.
Anyway one of these spiders crawled into the housing around the RJ45 port that I have on my PCMIA slot network card. I could see it because the housing is clear. But there wasn't a damn thing I could do to persuade it to leave.
I think it left of its own accord. It didn't take any bugs with it however. Maybe win98 bugs are not so tasty. Or there's too many for a small spider to cope with.
This does bring to mind the story of the old lady who swallowed a fly...
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Indeed. I remember that when I lived in Russia about 10 years ago most things there like irons, washing machines, samovars, etc. were built very solidly and would easily last for 10 years. I also remember seeing the schematics of an electric razor in a magazine and being able to buy all the pieces it was made of in a shop.
Now I live in Spain, and modern stuff looks cooler but breaks in a year or two.
Unfortunately the ADM3A doesn't work. It's got raster, but those hundreds of TTL chips just don't want to do anything other than display the cursor. But the first two kinds of terminals I ever used were ADM3A's and DecWriter II's, so I still want to hold on to it for now.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Another MS bashing post from someone who cant use windows.....
I much prefer a MS bashing post from someone who can use Microsft Windows.
50 years from now, there'll be a carefully preserved PC in a museum, and they'll spend hours trying to figure out why
their Windows display crashes after a few hours, not relising that this is a normal feature of the OS
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
I've got a bag of SIMM sticks I wanna sell ya. And if they aren't considered valuable in one thousand years, I'll double your money back!
;-)
Ha! Touché. Well, I've plenty of those floating around already, though I don't plan on being around to cash them in a thousand years hence, either...really, they'll only become valuable if there are only a few around anyway, so maybe I should hoard them
Cheers,
Mouser
If your DRM prophesy comes true, we will just buy our computers from underground woebsites out of Hong Kong, just as people buy region free DVD players today. Of course, if the f******* law had anything to say about it we wouldn't have to worry, as MarcoShit would lie in shambles for its antitrust violations, and if the government tried to enforce any BS such as DRM, a little somthing called the constitution would block it. But we all no that the damned reationaries in Washington are sucking Bill Gates cock all the way to the bank. So much for freedom.