Slashdot Mirror
What's the Hardiest Hardware You've Seen?
mrsev asks: "I work in a lab and so have lots of strange equipment around me. Recently I found an old 256Mb USB Flash Disk, that I had been looking for 6 months. This would not be amazing but for the fact that it was frozen in a block of ice in one of our -80C freezers (-112F). It must have fallen from my top pocket when I was reaching in. After chiping it out and a quick thaw and dry ... it worked!! All my data was intact and there were no problems. I am now looking for a victim to test in our liquid nitrogen storage facility. My question is what is the strangest hardware survival you have seen."
I saw a machine once that had Windows running on it for 5 years, and it survived it! After I installed Linux on it it worked like a charm.
I recently had an AMD 1400 Mhz chip that was used for my schools Journalism department. It has been dropped easily a few dozen times, left behind a VERY dirty, dusty desk for about a month, AND has been submerged in photo developing chemicals. Out of sheer curiosity, I put it on one of the boards the other day, and in amazement it still worked.
That was one for the record books.
I used one of these things while out in the field for a utility company doing GPS mapping. I threw the thing on the floor of my truck, accidentally dropped it a few times, and accidentally left it on top of my truck in the rain.
Everytime I pushed the power button the thing ran perfectly, regardless of the fact it was running 98SE. I wish I could buy one of those things on the open market, I love the damn things.
See here
I really hate Dan Patrick.
I once aquired a G3 wallstreet. It'd been left in the trunk for several months. There was no carpet, it was diurty, and the guy lived in an area with lots of pot holes.
When I get it it had nearly no paint on the bottom, and the top was scratched all to hell. but, it worked. LCD was in good shape, and it worked for a few months until I had passed it on to someone else.
Pretty Pictures!
See it here.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Low temperatures actually improves data retention in SRAM when it's unpowered, I know it's not Flash but they both do rely on storing charge.
The fact crazy people have previously immersed their PC in liquid nitrogen and still had a functional PC at the end shows that it shouldn't damage most electronics.
So assuming the low temperature didn't crack the PCB or chip leads and the moisture didn't short anything then it's not too surprising that it survived.
down a long flight of concrete stairs...
it bounced all the way to the bottom.
It survived with all data intact, :)
God bless Apple's case designers.
Now i've got a REAL monster, a Pentium 1 133mhz IBM thinkpad from a long time ago. Its been dropped down about 3 flights of concreate stairs, been hit in the LCD screen by a football a few times, survived the fury of a 6 year old kid, dropped on tarmac from 3-4ft.
The verdict? A nackered case, a flickery LCD, but a perfect, no badcluster HDD and it still works perfectly.
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
I've got a ~12 year old Seagate SCSI drive that still works fine.
You can cook eggs on it while it's running, but it still works.
One: Any Mackie soundboard. Mackie sales reps will smash the boards off the floor as hard as they can, then proceed to perform their sales pitch using the same board. Two: The PSU for an old 486/66 of mine... left it plugged in and running when the electric company's guys had to come by an fix the power... power switch was on both when the power was cut and when it came back. The PSU didn't work for a year and a half, but it's running as well as ever, now!
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
I use my Wacom Intuos2 tablet as a plate for extreme breakfast making while sittingin front of the pc, does that count?
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
I'm not sure where I found this, maybe it was an old /. article. Either way, a quick google search found it again.
http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/Personal8.html
Also, my iBook's been dropped a couple times, yanked off the desk by it's power cord, etc. No data loss or anything. My Compaq laptop took one little fall and the LCD screen broke and the hard drive was damaged.
"Procrasination is the key to world peace." ~Some girl in California
The card's performance, drivers etc sucked, but one time I put it into the AGP slot and sparks flew, literally ( a bolt of electricity jumped from end to end of the slot ). Smoke rose. Powered the thing up and everything worked fine.
The Macs that Apple had out in the 680x0 era have got to be the toughest things I've ever seen. I've got about four of them sitting in my room (I had more, but had to get rid of them to make space for more old comps). I've done pretty much everything imaginable to them, and they're just fine. The very early compact Macs in particular were very tough. The 128K to Plus or so had zero moving parts, except for the floppy drive, and their cases were made out of what seems to be thick steel (judging from their weight). The Apple series computers (e.g. IIGS) were pretty damned tough, too. Unfortunately, with their white plastic shell, the new Macs get scratched up extremely easily, and the cases aren't anywhere near as tough as those of vintage models. Oh yeahl, and their Laserwriters were damned tough, too. I've kicked my Personal Laserwriter 320 by accident a bunch of times, and it's taken numerous other abuses, but still works perfectly. I picked it up for 5 bucks at a flea market, so I have no idea what it took before then.
I used to work at a tech shop so of course when ever we had the chance we'd take delight in destroying equipment. There were monitor from building tops, screw driver heads on spinning disk platers, blanking plates in slot 1 cpu slots and just about anything else you can think of.
Someone tried to sell us a pretty old computer and when we told them it wasn't worth anything they ask us to trash it. The hard drive in the system was an old MFM 5.5 inch full height drive that had a non-removable cover. We tried to break it open with a hammer and could barely scratch the thing. I swear that you could have thrown the thing out of an airplane and it would surface scan ok.
Another time we had a custom throw their own computer through a wall after Windows locked up on them. The only thing that didn't have any damage was a USR 56k ISA modem. But that was only until we gave the modem back to the customer and he broke it into two piece in the front of our store(I personally think he had issues). It did take him about 5 minutes to crack the thing though....
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I once was working on a computer(mine luckily), and I was trying to get something to work(forgot what), but it involved plugging and unplugging the power supply, just for safety measures. Well, this particular case had a removable 3 1/2 bays, and I put it on one time. Little did I know it wasnt on all the way. So while working on the computer, this bay dropped, connected two connectors on the power switch(this had an AT powersupply, where these where hard power switches, power went directly through it). And well, sparks flew about a foot out of the case. Massive sparks, maybe a little more than thos sparklers you can get during the forth of july. I unplugged it as soon I was out of my deer-in-headlights stage. There was black soot around where it was sparking, and those two wires that went from the powersupply to the switch? They were welded together. But after getting a new power supply, the whole thing worked, minus the cache on the CPU. I had to disable cache in the bios for it to boot, it was incredibly slow. From that day on I learned how important cache is for a CPU, and never be too lazy to unplug the power cord when messing with your computer. This computer sort of survived, but the author of this story didnt mention usability.
A friend of mine had a Toshiba laptop way back when and it fell of the third floor fire-escape and landed on concrete below. The casing was a bit cracked and the keyboard popped off, but it still worked.
But speaking of "hardy hardware", I bought a 128MB USB memory drive a couple years ago when they first started hitting the market. I bought a DiskOnKey drive and it had quite an interesting spec sheet that said it could withstand shock up to 10 G's and vibrations of 5 G's. Not bad for a little drive like that. Most of the other ones I've seen recently are very fragile and the casing will pop open even when dropped from desk height.
(When I first saw the site name, I thought to myself, "Dis Konkey? What a stupid name.")
Would mrsev mind sharing the brand and model of his Flash disk? I wouldn't knowing what to look for in the store if/when I need a Flash disk later.
Many years ago I had the rubber/plastic band on my Casio Data Bank watch break. I decided not to get a new band and, instead, wondered how hardy the watch might be.
The Data Bank line is "water resistant" so I figured I'd try to kill it by putting it in a plastic cup filled with water and left in the freezer portion of a refrigerator over night. I forgot about it and, about a week later, saw it sitting in the little block of ice I'd made.
After busting the watch out the display was dim but still fully functional. All functions of the watch still worked.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
The winner and still champion
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's an obvious choice, but no discussion of hardware hardiness would be complete without mention of the venerable HP calculators.
I've been dragging a 42S around since college, and I've had it across the country on hazardous waste sites of every description. It's been dropped, used at extreme temperatures, and been exposed to solvents, PCBs, heavy metals, radioactive contamination, explosives, and asbestos, yet it keeps running like a champ. Truth be known, I suspect that it's continued functionality is due more to my ability to hide it from the decontamination Nazis and their scrub brushes and pressure washes.
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
The summer after my freshman year, I was working as a technician at a computer shop. We had horrible floods that summer, and a customer brought in an Acer 486DX66. It had been underwater for a week, buried in mud on the first floor of their house. He was only bringing it in to get a quote for the insurance company, and of course after taking one look at it we wrote it off completely.
The next week I had some free time and noticed the box sitting in the corner. I took it out back, turned the hose on it, removed and washed the cpu and memory, took it inside and plugged it in.
They were still using that computer as the fax server when I quit.
Back in the days when Commodore Australia and Commodore US were at war (atleast internally), I worked for a shop in Canberra Australia selling the brand new Amigas. Wonderful things.
.. the fridge was warm), got to work, parked, got out, and spotted the 3.5" floppy disk on the wall next to the car .. completely iced over. I freaked, calmed down, freaked, calmed down, chipped it out, and put it next to a VERY gentle heat source. Five hours later, I unscrewed the disk (remember when 3.5" disks had screws?) and transplanted the data to a new shell.
... now, back to work.
Well, we had contacts on both sides of the pond - and when Commodore Australia wouldn't give us the brand new 1.1 release of the boot disk, we contacted the US office and got one sent out to us. It came by courier late in the day, in the middle of winter. Indeed, I was just going home. I grabbed the disk, thinking that I'd take it home and test it out there. So I grabbed my stuff, got into the car, and drove home. Grabbed a drink, and promptly forgot about it.
Next morning, I got up (at a loverly -4C
Worked. Beutifully. A quick backup or 10 and we were happy. Indeed, that became a mascot disk at the place for a while, and worked for ages.
Ahh memories
Robert Anton Wilson
I've heard of a couple incidences of hapless field service techs backing over them with their cars. Still worked.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
You can get them on ebay for around $2,000. You can also buy them new in the $3K - $4K range.
I'd probably go for one of the lower-powered CF-25s for a couple hundred. Actually, I'd buy three of them and use two for parts. If you're really in the market for a portable that does duty in hazardous conditions, you're probably not going to be doing video editing and such on it anyway, and might be able to get by with a P166 CPU.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I had it in my shorts, I hit the pool. Still did not know it was in my short, threw them in the wash. Then the drier.
Found the damn thing when I was folding my shorts the next day, with water on the inside of it. Set it up on desk at work for about 3 days and pluged it in as it had the only known good copy of some offsite routers. Took a couple seconds and wamo there is my data, pull it off to the desktop. Reach down and find the little bugger all fogged up on the inside. 2 weeks on my desk for a real long term dry out and that damn thing still works like a charm.
Go figre....
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Nintendo controllers and systems have classically been made of ultra-durable plastic of doom. I remember throwing controllers again brick walls, and dropping gamecubes painfully high distances. Of course, I've never had any of these things break or stop working. I'm sure that when cockroaches rule the earth they will all play SNES games.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Just a few days ago I caught a rackmounted server on fire.
Turns out (and I know I've done this many times before without starting any type of fire) I had the ribbon cable in backwards on the floppy drive. When I turned the power on, immediately the power wires started glowing orange and the flames were about a foot high and smoke poured out of the case.
After I pulled the plug, only one segment of the power harness was melted (the part with the small floppy connector), so I cut that out, put the floppy cable in correctly, plugged in the other floppy power lead, and turned it back on.
Shocked the Hell outta me, but the thing still worked, and has been working ever since.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
I've dropped my zaurus (5500) onto various surfaces from large heights, scratches on the case, yes. But never does it stop functioning.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Back in the days when Nintendo Power was in its prime, readers wrote in all sorts of stories where their Nintendo products got "tortured".
These concisted of their GameBoys getting dropped repeatedly, a GameBoy cartridge getting flushed down the toilet, SuperNES systems being caught up in house fires but still performed perfectly, etc.
I don't know if their products are still that tough as I have never had a bad experience with my stuff, but they are very strong
For me that would have to be my trusty Ti-83 calculator. I have dropped that down flights of stairs, off desks coundless times, exposed it to freezing temperatures, boiling temperatures (I live in Canada, at my place in Canada it goes down to minus 35 degrees celcius in the winter and plus 35 degrees celcius in the summer). And pretty well abused it to all hell. It still works great!.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
The building I was working in over the summer (a school) was undergoing major rennovations. Completely new electrical system, phone system, new cielings, etc.
The day after the construction started (two days after the students left for the summer), we walked in to the building to find to our horror what looked like a war-zone. The cielings had been removed with a sledgehammer. Bits of drywall everywhere. The network and phone wires were hanging, supporting the old lighting fixtures. We knew then that the network cabling was garbage, and removed it all, but kept the phone system, thinking that if the new system was delayed, the offices would still have their old phones.
The summer passed. Lots of bad stuff happened in the building aside from that first day. Long story short, we were able to tie up the old phone lines. Only one had been broken. It's the day before school opens, and the new phones aren't installed yet - thank God we saved the old system. We go to plug in the controller for the PBX, and are greeted with a sound not unlike a gunshot, as flames lept out of the cabinet and power supply. (My guess is that the noise came from the surge surpressor which recoiled several feet as a result of the large bang, and was smoldering).
Fearing the worst, we replace the surge supressor, grab an extension cord, and try another outlet. Lo and behold, the phones work perfectly (one line had a bit of static on it). School opened without a hitch.
Also during that project, we had our T1 DSUs/CSUs nearly destroyed. We were never told that the concrete wall they were mounted on was having several holes cut in it for HVAC. We arrive to find our equipment buried in bits of concrete and a large hole directly above the board (a sledgehammer was used). Amazingly, after being shaken out, they too worked fine.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I once had the good fortune to open for Kid 606 and Matmos (currently Bjork's support act) at a bar. Being a DJ I was using good old fashioned vinyl on Technics sl1200 turntables - now those are tough turntables and take a lot of punishment. but....
Matmos setup their laptops in the DJ both - a pair of Powerbooks they just laid them on top of the turntable platters. Anyway they DJ'd anyway in their own fashion until someone accidently hit the start button on the Turntable and the laptop crashed to the concrete floor.
And it kept playing without a glitch, they picked it up, checked the connections and then continued with their set.
Maybe not the toughest hardware, but a pretty spectacular demonstration of real world survivability.
I unwittingly left my cell phone in my pocket when I went to do laundry. Didn't notice until I saw the antenna in the lint trap of the dryer. Got it out and turned it on and it still worked. I was pretty amazed. Makes the $100 I dropped on it seem worth it.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
My workmate hid his laptop in the oven when he was going away for a weekender. There had been a bout of burglaries in the neighbourhood and so he was a little bit paranoid.
You know where this is going...
He came back after the trip and thought he'd make himself a pizza. So he pre-heated the oven to 400F. After the smoke cleared, he took the laptop out and threw it out in the snow and left it there for a good while for it to cool down.
The top of the lid was mostly melted away and had fused with the bottom half. He had to crack it open. Surprisingly the LCD worked, the machine booted up. It still works to this date. Unfortunately Compaq didn't think it was good enough to advertise the ruggedness of his machine and so they turned down his offer.
My spoon is too big.
I have a portable Napa CD/VCD player that came with a small remote for controlling VCD's. I accidentally left it in a pocket on a pair of pants and it went though the washing machine AND dryer before it was found again. I had to change the battery in it but it works just fine. Lesson of this story? Always check your pockets before washing stuff. My iBook has also taken a beating and still works fine...I used to carry it around in a backpack laptop case with heavy books, it got crushed a few tims, dropped on its' corners multiple times....and it still works like new excep the latch is braken but that's no big deal, rather a small annoyance.
My wife recently washed and dryed my drive. Thankfully, and in likeness to the story, the drive was completely in tact, and with a nice new fresh smell.
PNY made the drive, gotta give'em credit!
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
I still have my old Mac Classic II running under my desk today, at a spritely 16Mhz, with its original 80Mb hard drive. I use it for MacMoria and the original Civilisation, but damn, do I love my Mac.
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
back in the '80s, seagate made some 20MB hard drives ('ST-255' and friends) that I've seen hold up like no other fixed disc in memory. not long ago, I pulled a pair of them out of a dead PC-XT -- where they'd been, collecting dust, for 8 years, after 9 years in continuous service -- stuck them in another XT clone box, and fired it up. the drives spun for 9 hours while their contents were delivered out thru the slow XT serial port, without so much as a single failed CRC32 :-)
Rumer has it that you can prop up the side of a house with an HP laserjet II or III. I've dropped several 5Ms and 4s onto concrete from up to 1 meter and still gotten test pages along with burning smells and grinding noises. Their newer printers are a lot more fragile though. Still, if you want to really abuse something, buy an old rackmount Prolient server. I've never had the privilage of destroying one, but ruined several drillbits on a modding project.
I actually improved a system through abuse!
I have this old Motorola PPC PReP motherboard I use for a fileserver. It had stopped autobooting, but would still boot if I manually typed the boot command on the console.
One day I was playing with it and managed to plug in the power leads wrong (AT power supply :-(). When I turned on the switch and the fans just sort of twitched I instantly realized what I had done.
I plugged them in correctly and turned it on and it still worked!. All of the NVRAM had been erased, but once I re-entered all of the configuration (and guessed at a few values since I don't have a manual) it started auto-booting again.
I have also seen chips meant for 3.3V power run for weeks on 5V power before anyone noticed. Some chips are really tuff.
From this Slashdot article, apparently the toughest hardware is an Xbox.
I reckon that the Warthog in Halo must be made from the same stuff as an Xbox
Considering I went through 3 or 4 of these before getting an iPod, I am consistantly impressed with the little thing.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
I have a symbol compact flash 802.11b card. I had a habit of keeping it in my shirt pocket, and one day I remember idly having my hand on my chest, feeling the CF card and thinking "Blimey! I'd forgotten all about that! I might have put my shirt in the wash!" then thinking "heh - as IF! I'm FAR too smart to do something STUPID like that!!!"
Cut to two weeks later and I'm pulling clothes from the washing machine, then I hear a clatter on the floor. Cue guttaral moan that could probably be hard across the street. Yep - I'd washed the CF card complete with spin cycle.
I left it on a radiator for about two weeks, then crossed my fingers and put it in my PDA - it worked fine and has done ever since!
My trusty hammer.
Sure I've had to change the head a couple of times, and also the handle, but aside from that it's as good as new.
a world in progress...
I once dropped a (at the time broken) Sony Discman out my second floor window, it first hit a ledge, and then the ground, landed face up, with the top open. I wasn't too worried about it since it was broken. It then proceeded to get rained on for a week. When I finally got it back inside, the PCB was coated in mud, and it was essentially a mess. I washed it off with water (after all, i might as well use the parts for something). Turn it on, it works. Apparently rain and mud fixes Sony Discmen.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
At my alma mater the psychology department had a PDP-8 they used for statistical analysis. This machine was kept on the 2nd floor of a rather run-down WW II vintage building.
One day this building caught fire and was completely ruined. During the collapse of the building the PDP-8 fell from the 2nd floor to the basement.
After recovery from the basement it was found to still work, despite the partially melted exterior. In fact some claimed it was less tempermental after the fire than before. Of course DEC used pictures of it in many ads.
But anybody wearing an xbox under their shirt would not be able to walk or even stand up. And don't even think about lying down, the bugger will crush your rib-cage.
Remember MiniDiscs? They always said you could run them over with a car and they'd stoll work fine. I've tried this and it's true! I also have a Mac Plus that runs perfectly fine, it's not necessarily hardy but it sure is lasting forever!
Way back (late 80s) I had a used Toshiba laptop - you know, blue monochrome LCD, 2 floppy. I slipped running up the front stairs of my apartment (concrete steps, concrete landing) and fell swinging the laptop over my head and smashing it down on the landing. Pieces flew everywhere but I just took out the soldering iron and melted the brass inserts back into the plastic case, carefully figured out where everything went, reassembled it and used it for quite a while thereafter.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I once beat a man to death with a Model M keyboard. Worked just fine before and since.
OK, I didn't really. But I'm sure I could have, those things really are invincible (also big and heavy) - fire, physical shock, water (or beer), nothing hurts them.
I've got a 128 meg compact flash card that has been in my right front pocket every work day for the last 9 months. It has a software reflash for a device that my company sells on it. I run in to customers that need the update about once or twice a week. It has now made 3 trips through the washer and dryer and still works.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
In 8th grade, Michael torino used to spit in the disk drives every time he used them, todd difosid knoced them off the desk once and it still worked, there were M&Ms in the disk drives, and people generally beat teh crap out of them. They refused to die. My hat is off to the desiginers of these systems, they took the worst crap the 8th grade class from hell could throw at them, and kept on going.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Way back at the beginning of the last decade, I worked for an Apple reseller. The Iomega rep gave me a couple of the then-new Bernoulli 90MB drives, and I wound up using them to shuttle data between home and work. The drives were pretty rugged, but the disks were awesome.
I used to leave them in my car for days on end in mid-winter (and this is New England - it gets pretty danged cold here) and use them with no problem. But one time, I had no better alternative to use as an ice scraper, so I used a Bernoulli 90 disk, figuring the disk would be toast afterwards (but hey, it was free, so why not sacrifice it?). So I chipped the ice off my car with it and didn't think twice about it.
The disk worked with no problems at all for years afterwards.
Needless to say, the later Zip and Jaz drives were nowhere near as rugged, but Zip was the most rugged small media format (the drives were fragile, but the disks were pretty tough) you could get easily until flash drives took off the last couple of years. SyQuest disks, OTOH, would die if you looked at them funny.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Way back in the day, I had a 1k SRAM that I had abused in every which way possible. It ended up in my TRS-80 to give it lowercase. It mostly worked, but the way it mostly worked was really cool:
A funny thing about my TRS-80, something different from any other one you've ever seen, is that when you first turned it on, you would only see funny characters on the screen. I mean things like a circle with a dot in it, or a greek letter... that kind of stuff. Then the characters would slowly start to flicker, and then you could see that they were trying to be regular characters, and then they were mostly regular characters with just a faint image of the funny character, and then finally, a minute later, the regular characters you expected were on the screen, the funny characters having faded to black. It was really a neat effect, but not one I got on purpose. What happened is that I had hacked an extra memory chip into the video memory to get upper and lowercase. To save money, the designers had put only seven bits of memory into the video memory (seven chips, each one having 1024 bits), and what they gave up was lowercase and special characters (they could have kept lowercase and special characters, but instead allowed graphics with some really bit pixels). But the character encoder that turned the video memory bits into bits on the monitor could handle lowercase, and I read an article that showed how to piggyback another memory chip onto the video memory to get lowercase, and so I decided to do that. It just so happened that I had one of these chips around, but it's one I had abused -- I used it for experiments. Among other things, it got sucked through a vacuum cleaner once, but I had unbent the pins and kept it. And that's the chip that went into my TRS-80. But it turns out that it just wouldn't work cold because of the abuse I had given it. Once it got warm then it worked just fine, and that's why my computer needed a minute to warm up before you could see regular characters on the screen.
When I worked repairing windows PCs someone brought in a PC that was recovered from a fire in their house. The case was badly melted and the machine smelled very bad, but the machine would boot just fine. We were able to recover all the data!
There\'s no place like ~
I've washed a few of these things -- as in clothes washer then dryer -- and have been shocked to find they still worked. Mind you these are cards that I use as a photographer at a 400,000-circ daily newspaper, so any hiccups after the spin cycle treatment would be quickly noticed, but they just churn along. Too bad I can't say as much for the cameras I put them into!
I used to overclock a couple Celery 300s on an ABIT BP6 mobo. I used peltier plates between the CPU and heatsinks. Once in awhile I'd do something that required me to slow the thing down to see if that was the problem. A couple times I left it slow (actually at normal speed) and it 'grew' unstable and then stopped. Both times I looked inside and saw mold/algea growing around the CPUs!. When I left the plates turned on and the CPUs slow there wasn't enough heat to remove and the dew point was reached. Condensation would form and then mold would grow. I did this twice in 1 1/2 years until I retired the mobo, still serving files.
To clean them, I used toothpaste and an old brush on the CPU. Got the pins nice and shiny. And used a dry toothbrush on the mobo after drying it for ~10mins with a hairdryer.
I have an Atari 2600 that's several years older than me (1978 1st production run, I believe).
About a year ago, while it was sitting in my closet, something overflowed in my attic and flooded the case. Keep in mind that the bottom tray of a 2600 is essentially watertight; it sat there like that for about a week, the hardware immersed in water.
Emptied it out, opened it up. Some corrosion. Powered it up, works fine!
I work at a little computer store and had gotten in 3 machines there were in a fire that we were doing data recovery on.
One of them was a dell P4 machine, the case was all melted. The case both inside and out was covered in both ash and water. For my own entertainment I pulled the motherboard, processor and power supply out and washed them really well. After letting them dry for a while i plugged them in and to my suprise it worked.
The video card didn't survive, a couple of the surfice mount components actually cracked in half.
I tried to call Dell afterwards to get a new case for it and ended up being transfered to every department at the place just to be told an hour later that they didn't sell cases. Stupid motherboards that can't be installed in standard cases.
-Mary
My son who was about 1 1/2 at the time dropped my philips pronto touchscreen remote ( $400 when I bought it ) in the bathtub. When I pulled it out, the screen had soapsuds in it!.
I opened the case and removed the electronics. I soaked the whole package in distilled water a few times to get rid of the soap residue. I then put it into the oven on the lowest setting for a couple of minutes. I did this about an hour to make sure it was completely dry.
I left it overnight and when I reassembled it in the morning, it still works!-- and continues to work to this day, 2 years later.
My girlfriend is still using my old Compaq Laptop. I figure it must have been bitten by a vampire or something.
"Derp de derp."
MY athlon once caught fire after a catastrophic water cooling failure. The temperature inside the case were hot enough to melt the solder off of my video card and there was electrical arcingfrom an unfused power supply to my peltier junction. Also I'm typing this post on it right now (w/ a different video card) :)
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
At my old job a freind and I found an old 300 MB HD. We decided to take the cover off and look inside. Then we plugged it into a 486 we had around and installed Win 3.11 - All while the cover was off. We let it run for a few days and watched the head move back and forth. Finaly we got board of defrags and decided to kill it. First off with compressed air upside down (so it spits a cold liquid) then with magnets. The damn HD kept on going. Finaly we started throwing shit at it. That killed it slowly.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
and an etch-a-sketch that I dropped that works too (though I lost all of my *data* when I dropped it).
The building where I worked had been wired by morons. The NEMA 20 wall plugs were labeled incorrectly (110 vs. 220) and so when we plugged in a 110 UPS to a 220 socket, the sparks flew, acrid smoke poured out of the vents, etc. It took guts to reach back in there and disconnect the sucker. We lost a couple units like this.
I was a field tech for several years, about half the calls were printers, and I can tell you that there are a lot of Laserjet II and III series units still running fine. They really built 'em in those days; there's a stark contrast to how the newer, lower-end printers are put together internally (I think the 6L has a wind-up key in the back...) My main printer at home is an LJ2, built in 1986. I could probably drop it out a window and, at most, have to replace the heating element in the fuser.
As for abuse - well, there was one secretary at an office who was "feeding" Cheerios into a printer... (but that belongs in the "wacky user stories" thread)
Perfectly Normal Industries
When i was building my 1st computer. My 1st processor didn't work. and the company who sold it wouldn't take it back for some stupid reason. So I kicked it around on the ground, kept it in my pocket, combed my hair with it, threw it around, played catch with it... Then I had pcoessor die and was desprate for something. So i stragtened the pins out on my p166 w/mmx and wholy crap it worked after all the abuse and sitting unprotected in the bottom of a bin for several months.
My trusty body.
I had to change the head a couple times, but it still works! Can't say much for the looks, but it's almost impossible to move a soul from one body to another and all that.
Only problem is that now all my attempts at humor on slashdot are duds.
Ron Paul 2012
I worked IT/MIS for a company that had several older buildings including one that had a System 32 in it from way back when. Someone decided that they wanted that computer gone and since it was a computer and I was a computer guy it was my problem. Having never seen a S/32 before I grabbed my little leatherette pouch of little tiny screwdrivers, needlenose plyers and wirecutters just in case.
... WTF and he asked if I had ever seen the machine in question. D'oh, no.
Boss stopped me, suggested I leave those behind and we stopped at the diesel mechanics shop for crowbars, a hacksaw, and a few 4 pound sledgehammers. I was like
Get there and this thing is a beast. The printer frame was cast aluminum about the same size and strength as the intake manifold and heads on a Chevy V8 engine. The computer itself was made of 1" steel square tubing that was like a quarter inch thick, the bolts that held it together looked like something you would use on a house. The hard drive was a single platter, and the base housing was cast bronze or something, weighed about 20 - 25 lbs or so, about the size of a current ATX desktop case, and the motor for the drive was a monster 220V electric motor about the size of a small pumpkin - half horsepower maybe?
I have no clue why I was there taking that monster apart, but I got a real good appreciation for how Tonka tough IBM used to make their computers. Probably less powerful than my $50 calculator but built like a tank.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
It was set on fire, it was dropped down steps, it had water dumped on it. still worked. What finally broke it? Someone bumped into it and somehow the eye stopped reading CDs.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I once dropped an Apple LaserWriter Plus (these are the 1985 era cube shaped models that weigh near 70 lbs) down a flight of stairs...which resulted in some chipped stairs, but no obvious harm to the laser printer. After that I figured it could just stay in the basement.
Later on, after it ceased being useful as a printer (still worked, there's just not much you can print from a PostScript printer with only 512K RAM), it led a long glorious life as a step stool.
Apple makes tough hardware.
...but pretty much any of Nokia's older phones are indestructable. I once accidentally dropped my 5160 out of my car window...while driving at around 35mph. I stopped, got out, went to pick it up, noticed the case was cracked ($20 for replacement), and the battery had fallen out, but the damn thing still worked fine after I reattached the battery. About a week or so later I managed to step on it while wearing Timberland boots, and once again, the case cracked (another $20), but it still functioned perfectly. Finally, just last week, in a fit of rage, my girlfriend threw it against the side of my house...the only side made of brick...and yet again, the case cracked...but the son of a bitch just kept on truckin'.
Are you asking him, "whoa, it worked when you bought it?" or "whoa, it worked when you bought it?"? I laughed @ 1st, thinking that it was the 2nd question, but now I'm beginning to wonder. :^)
testing out my trending skills
I once did tech support for our customers. The folks were obviously heavy smokers, because you could see ashes over the keyboard, desk & computer. When I opened it up, you could see ashes inside, if I recall correctly. I was so amazed @ how filthy the place was.
testing out my trending skills
last spring my mom, insisting that she wash my clothes, tossed in my pants with my usb drive in it - filled with all my current papers, school notes, etc.
right after my clothes went through the wash cycle i saw the usb drive, and yelled at my mom about everything that happened, since the drive wasn't working. but after waiting a few hours the usb drive started working perfectly again with all my files still there.
that's a hardy ah hard-a-ware-ah.
My mother's laptop has survived a duck climbing all over it, didn't even scratch the screen -- maybe it's a witch.
My old Nokia 3360 was thrown off a 6th floor balcony, into the sand, spent the night, and then worked fine. All without the back of the case and the battery. Sand was all over the thing.
http://phreakinb.com
About 1986 I was living in Fort St. John BC, Canada. It had been a bitterly cold winter, but it was now spring breakup. As I was walking home from elementary school along a dirt road I looked down and saw a watch with no strap in a puddle. I broke the puddle free with a rock, took it home, and thawed it out in the kitchen sink. As far as I know that watch never stopped working; I lost it in about 1990.
I know you all are thinking about computers, but I've had some radios that amazed me. When two-way radio equipment started getting microcontrollers in them everybody in the industry started to worry that they wouldn't take the abuse.
One of my customers, a mining company, had just taken delivery of a new GE radio system including MTL model portable radios. One of the foremen kept sending his radio in for repair and I couldn't find anything wrong with it. I went out to talk to him in person about the problems he was having and he told me that he was a die hard Motorola man, a GE radio simply wouldn't do and he didn't want it. No problem with the radio.
Some time after that he started throwing the radio around, throwing it away even. Someone would find it, send it in to me for repair. I would simply clean it up and give it back. This pissed off the foreman so he drove his pickup over it, several times. It came to me with broken knobs and a bent antenna, replaced them and all was well.
The next repair the forman swore was an accident. The radio fell out of his pocket as he walked in front of a Cat D-8 dozer. The dozer ran over the radio, again broken knobs and bent antenna.
After that the foreman was sold. A die hard GE man was born.
Boy was he pissed off when, a few months later, GE got out of the radio business and he had to start buying Motorola again.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Before I finally replaced the weak belt clip--
1) It fell off my belt and was "kicked" by me as I walked, took a fall down several flights of steps in a parking garage... I went down 4 flights to get it (it fell down the center area)
2) A few days later it fell off the clip again while car shopping in a lot of 500+ cars... stayed in the parking lot over night in a rain storm... found the next day by someone who turned it in to the dealership...
3) Three days later, fell off in the bed of my pickup while I was doing something, spent several cold (below 30*F) nights, including one w/ rain before I found it.
I finally replaced the clip, and it hasn't fallen since...
It's about 20 months old and still works just fine... tho the battery only lasts about 6 hours and the antenna broke off 19 1/2 months ago...
But would you trust your Gamecube as body armor?
Yes, I would. I have a video of a GameCube being tied to a rope and driven behind a vehicle (not sure what it is) on some rough roads for a couple of minutes, then they go back to their house, show the scratches and bumps off, and then they turn on the GameCube and it runs Super Mario Sunshine perfectly.
All generalizations are inaccurate...except that one about gen....fsck it.
Texas instruments calculators are indestructible.
I have had a TI-85 since high school. It has survived being immersed in water, several soft drink spills, and being run over by a car. Batteries and some screws fixed everything. Unfortunately, the display is missing several columns of pixels, but what can you expect.
I bought a IIcx on ebay - advertised as "as is" and unknown if it worked. Hey, I liked the case and didn't have one yet, and it was $10 =)
Turned out it'd been half submerged in a flood then populated by mice. Between the silt, leaves, mouse pee, water and mouse crap it was in a sad state.
EVERYTHING got a thorough soaking cleaning under detergent and hot running water, then warming and drying. Thankfully the peeing rodents hadn't been there long enough to corrode too much. A spray over with silicon based furniture polish stopped anything on the motherboard corroding anymore in the last 2 years. Still works fine, HD and all
I'll stack up my ancient Mac IIcx as a survivor, I still have it because nobody would ever want an old dog CPU like that. But in those days, it was state of the art. I had a RasterOps 364 video capture board, which at that time cost almost as much as the CPU. I did some amazing multimedia projects with this board, it was more valuable to me than the computer.
So one day I'm sitting in my apartment working on the IIcx when I hear the shriek of a table saw coming from next door and the lights start to go dim intermittently. The landlord decided to start that remodelling job on the vacant apartment. I decided I better save my work and shut down. Just as I finished the save, but before I shut down, I heard the landlord sawing, he pushed the board too fast and jammed the saw, causing the lights to go very dim, then the lights went out, he blew the circuit breaker. And I was on the very same breaker as the table saw. I heard a short BZZT sound coming from my Mac and smelled smoke. Oh shit.
So I open up the CPU, the RO364 board is toast, there are obvious signs of melting and smoke damage. It was either a huge power surge that overran my surge protector, or else the landlord was using a cheater plug and somehow managed to short 120v right through my computer when the saw motor bogged down (this was an old apartment with bad wiring).
But there were no obvious signs of damage to the Mac. I dug up my original 8 bit video card to replace the blown RO364 card, maybe the CPU will work. I waited for the landlord to quit for the day, then I fired up the Mac. It still worked!
As the landlord left, I told him that I wished he'd warned me before he started sawing because his saw blew out my $1500 video card, and I couldn't afford to replace it. I told him he should give me a free month's rent for compensation. You can guess how well that went.
But at least I managed to preserve my perfect Apple hardware record. I have never owned anything but Apple CPUs, and I have never EVER had a piece of Apple brand-name hardware break, or develop even a minor hardware defect. My Mac IIcx even survived an incident that destroyed an internal card! I thought that was astonishing because both the CPU and the video card ran off the same power supply, and were presumably subjected to the same electric charge.
Once upon a time (1998) I was working for a cell phone operator in Austria. ...) were scattered in a 5 m radius around the mast.
We (two colleges and I) were working on the top of a 45 m high mast, installing antennas. Suddently the mobile of one college dropped out of his trouser pocket, falling more than 40m and landed on the concrete base. Its parts (keyboard, akku, cover parts,
After putting it together and switching it on again, it worked perfektly! Only the front cover had a crack in the transparent display area (wich costed 12$ to replace).
(I have withheld one peace of information: its livesaver! The phone was inside a leather pouch)
The checkbox said "Requires Windows 98, NT, or better. And so I installed Linux
Purchased July 95. Been crushed twice in bus doors, cracked the case but happily worked. Tried its luck as a subamarine one day when it fell out of my bag as I was saying bye to my kids in the bath. Left it to dry 24 hours and has been working since then 5 years straight as my firewall. The original battery still holds a charge for about 50 mins, so I dont even need a UPS.
My brother inherited a keyboard from me that I bought in 1994. It survived four years in a fraternity house room with beer repeatedly spilled in it and still worked. It finally died this year.
At a previous job we did computer consulting for a local Christian school. One student left his notebook computer on the ground and a bus ran over it. It worked fine except for some cracks in the screen (and Toshiba replaced it free of charge under the super warranty program we had).
I ran over my future wife's iBook on my bike. Long story short: I was coming to a stop and started swinging my backpack around and discovered the zipper was failing. As I watched my front wheel plow over the top of that white plastic case I knew for sure I'd be buying her a new computer. The only real evidence of the mishap was a scuffed up corner and the tire mark, which washed away before I returned it to her.
I had an old Qualcomm Sprint phone that got bounced off concrete, fell down the stairs, banged against the wall and barely had a scratch. I used to demonstrate its sturdyness for my friends by dropping it on the floor and kicking it. The plastic shell must have been 1/4 of an inch thick.. The only reason I stopped using it is because I wanted a PDA phone...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
My 6 year old TI-30 has taken a beating. Don't have a TI-8x yet, but getting one, need more firepower :)
it's been dropped, stepped on, smashed, slammed against desks, etc and keeps working.
i also have a 128MB flash drive thats very small (just the chip with some really hard clear yellow tinted plastic around it), the cap has a small fracture and the keyring piece broke off (weakest link), but it's been dropped from desk height onto concrete numerous times.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
About 15 years ago I worked for a steel industry. We had those serial, dumb terminals all over the place. Some of them were in places where you have very high temperatures and large quantities of a kind of carbon dust in the air. Some times we had to take them off and to clean the insides, we had to let them imersed in soap water for 24 Hs so the old dust was softed enough to allow us to scrub it off. After that we hang them to dry and voila! Those things never stopped! I really *doubt* a normal PC can handle that place.
Scientia est Potentia
I always hated Compaq before, from days of doing modem phone support. They stored the BIOS on a bios partition, so if you wiped your drive your BIOS disappeared. A little annoying. But I inherited this AMD Presario years ago and it's been a solid little performer. I've gutted and put it back together several times, run different flavors of Windows, and now is my little Apache server on Mandrake. And the integrated sound and video card even works still!
This Compaq was a nice surprise in quality.
I used to do PC repairs for this guy who had the support contract for a local coal mine.
The coal mine owned a bunch of IBM PS/2 model 60s and 80s which where down the shaft, and their job was to record the incoming coal trains with the load information (ran coax back to the shaft).
I had to open them a few times and I learned after the first time to wear clothes that I didn't care about since the coal dust was everywhere. Power supplies where stuffed, about 4 inches of the crap on every surface inside the case.
Everything still worked though, and after a good cleaning I'd return the system to the mine and someone else would take it back down.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I have a 4 MB ati allinwonder pci card that still works. It hasnt been dropped down any stairs or hit by a truck but It still works... mabe Ill throw it arround a bit when I get home.
Anyway, I stuck it in my Compaq Deskpro 286 which was, of course, 8MHz. It worked fine but got rather hot. Never needed a heatsink though. Possibly if it had been clocked to 10 or 12MHz it would have.
That was in the days when overclocking meant something. Going from 12MHz to 16MHz was a big jump. Now people wet themselves over going from 1.8MHz to 1.9MHz, and the difference is tiny.
It's probably the twelve-year-old Performa 467 I keep around to play old Ambrosia games (yeah, I know about Basilisk, and I use it on my Win2K box for old Mac apps that I like that require an '040). That's been with me since I was seven, and it's put up with an internal HD failure and abuse from me, my kid brother, my sister, the family, and one incident with a dog, but other than that, it's dang hardy.
Of course, there's my 200 GB LaCie external USB hard drive. That's been kicked around a lot, and it still works. (It's currently a backup drive on my Win2K Server box.)
Actually, hell, any of the computers at my workplace count. Y'see, elementary school kids and computers don't mix well. Amazingly, though, I've not had to call the hardware repair company out in about three years. The old Macs we have are dang durable, and the Compaq Deskpros could be beaten with a mallet and not show damage. (I know, I've done it.)
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
I used to hotswap it on my performa 6116/CD. Now it was never intended for that but if you have a utility to rescan the bus the disks will mount. It was an internal drive. After a while of doing this the drive for ejecting the disk wore out. In order to get the thing to take/eject disks I had to move the gears manually! After a while of hotswapping the jazz drive wouldn't power up at all. So after taking the main board apart there was a good charred mark by the power connector and there was no continuity. After dropping a good amount of solder on it, it powered right up. I think the drive died about 3 months later.
Fan fell off. We ran it with no cooling whatsoever. Logo burned off. Computer still worked the day we decomissioned it.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
When I think of the hardiest hardware, the first thing that comes to mind is the venerable Crown DC-300A amplifier. Mounted in an Anvil flight case, this staple of many rock tours was virtually indestructible, both physically and electrically. Each unit could pump out a steady 600 Watts all day long, and would be pristine after a fall from a 40' semi trailer.
Crown manufactured open-reel tape decks before they got into the amplifier business. Those were designed to travel with missionaries who went into the uncharted wilderness, looking for souls to save. But the name Nagra is synonymous with bulletproof tape decks. Go figure.
The HP calculators of the 70s were nearly indestructible, thanks to their ABS plastic cases and first-rate engineering. For example, the buttons had injection molded characters (rather than painting them on), so they would be readable until the entire button wore away.
Fluke was legendary for making field test instruments that took tremendous amounts of abuse. The first Ampex VTRs (the ones that used 2" tape) have a bulletproof reputation as well. In fact, quite a few TV stations still keep a couple around (after 40 years of constant usage) so they can play back archival footage. And of course, Nikon is well-known for making rugged 35mm SLR cameras.
OTOH, the Apollo astronauts used Hasselblad cameras to take those priceless pictures on the moon. They were also issued special wristwatches. I don't remember who made them. Anybody?
When it comes to wristwatches, the Synchronar 2000 (an early digital watch) was probably the winner in that class. The watch itself was embedded in an epoxy block, which was then fitted into a stainless steel case that provided attachment points for the bracelet, and also housed small magnets that activated tiny reed switches inside the epoxy. These were used to operate the watch. The manufacturer claimed that in testing, they put one on a railroad track, and it survived being run over by a train. That's pretty impressive!
Seriously. Have you seen how you have to install the heatsink? The instructions tell you to use a screwdriver and jam the little doohicky thing until it snaps onto the casing. I was freaking out during this whole procedure. I thought that my motherboard was going to snap in half.
These are delicate devices we are dealing with. Also, you'd think they would make this easier since the (almost) majority of the people installing these dont have much upper-body strength.
~~
Just got done watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture . I nominate Vger.
No contest on this question. My brother has a Motorola 120-series cellular phone which he A) dropped in a bucket of tile adhesive, completely submersing it B) left out in the rain twice, both times with it on, once having to recover it from thick mud, and C) dropped a 50-pound motor assembly on. Looks and works like new except for a small dent from the motor. Unbelievable.
I used to work IBM tech support. Had a guy who put one of our T20-series laptops on the top of his car and forgot about it until he got to the the freeway and it hit the ground at speed. The body of the laptop was torn up; it was missing chunks of casing. You could see the motherboard through the gouges. But it worked. Machine turned on and worked fine. Screen was untouched. The guy was afraid to touch it. Thought it'd fall apart if he shook it too hard. But yeah, got it filed under "cosmetic damage" and repaired at the cheapest rate we had.
Several years ago, my roommate had a 40M hard drive he was bringing back to school in Austin from his home in Houston.
He packs his car up and drives off. As he rounds the first corner, he hears a strange noise, but didn't see anything, so he continues on the three-hour drive back to Austin.
When he arrives, he finds that the hard drive is nowhere to be found. He remembered bringing it out to the car and setting it on roof to load it up. Then he remembered the noise as he turned the corner. So he calls home, his sister walks down the street, and finds the hard drive laying in the gutter where it fell off the roof of his car.
He want back the next week and got it. The alignment of the heads had been b0rked by the fall from his car roof onto concrete at 30mph, so the data was a total loss, but after doing a low-level format, the drive itself was fine and ran for several years.
A friend in College ran over his HP48 with a car. It looked bad, but the display was fine, and all the keys still worked.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I too, have frozen hardware. I read an article in a computer mag a few months back about recovering data from a dead HD; one idea was to stick the HD into the freezer for an HOUR and maybe it would move the head/platters enough to get some data off for a short time. Well, I forget about the 4gig I stuck in our freezer. For a few months. Took it out today and it works! Slapped it in a ghettobox and slapped Slackware on it!
I have an old sony walkman w/ g-protection (model D-EJ625). It's been submerged in water and dropped about 5 feet onto concrete 4 or so times. It's also been to the beach and back about 12 times. It's also survived spit in the headphone jack for 4 years running. It's also been in direct sunlight for four hours once. It's scratched up pretty good.... but otherwise... it works great. just randomly shuts off sometimes if you remove and replug the headphones or twist their jack.
[[]] Don't get your bikini in a bundle, I'm just chlorinating the gene pool. [[]]
A once had an 800 Mb HD that had the following warning:
:-)
"Warranty will be void if device suffers impact of over 70 G."
Even if you drop a 747 on it the warranty is guaranteed!
Anyway, on my way back it started to get dark, with the result that I reached the river which lay between me and the campsite somewhat upstream of the ford I'd used on the way out. Rather than look for the ford in the dark, I decided to wade across, forgetting the Walkman in my pocket. Of course the water was deeper than I expected.
I remebered the Walkman only once I'd climbed out oh the other side. Took it out of my pocket, poured out the water, closed it, and turned it on, without even letting it dry (I was younger and more stupid then). And walked back to the campsite listening to the music.
I still have it, and it still works, along with a couple of newer models (also Sony).
I had a M-DACT which was loose in the back of a HUMMER (a real one), which was in a multi vehicle pileup. The terminal which was unmounted took flight, sheered an antenna cable off the terminal, and hit the windsheild. When we recovered the gear I powered the terminal on and it worked fine. I replaced the antenna cable and kept the unit in service.
I don't know how much they weigh - easily 100lbs. - but one of my customers had an old 3812 line printer that he wanted to get rid of, on the grounds that no one printed from his AS/400 any more.
Fair enough.
I was working alone that day, and the dollies were all locked up, so I ended up carrying it out to the loading dock. It was unbelievably bulky and awkward, and by the time I got to the edge of the dock closest to the dumpster, my hards were all sweaty. It slipped right out of my hands, straight down between the dumpster and the dock, probably 8 feet all told, and onto concrete. It went "CLANG", and I could tell it was the printer that was ringing, not the dumpster.
The dumpster was almost as tall as I am. I knew I wasn't going to be able to safely lift it up over my head by myself.
So I put it in my car, figuring I could just set it out with my trash.
When I got home I noticed the thing had a 5.25" floppy drive in it, and the worst thing I could say about it was that it looked scuffed from its close encounter with the ground. It didn't have a parallel port, but it did have a DB9, token ring and twinax interfaces.
I hauled it out of my car and under my garage workbench, plugged it in and ran a modem cable to it from my workbench PC. Added some paper...
OK. It didn't print.
But it WANTED to. There just wasn't any toner in it. I snagged a toner and a fuser kit for it from my client the next time I visited, fed it to my printer and...
It's a line printer. It doesn't do fonts or any other stupid crap. But it prints text at an amazing 12 pages per minute, probably faster if I had it hooked up through token ring. Perfect for big jobs, like printing out man pages and email and stuff.
My other IBM example? I stepped on a T20 a couple years back. The keyboard, not the display, fortunately. Some keys came off. I put them back on, everything was fine.
Ye gads did IBM overbuild their hardware.
Not really "durable" in a classic sense, but one of my clients also has a Netware 3 machine with just over 3000 days of uptime, an ancient Zeos machine with 4 2GB SCSI disks and UPS that's probably been dead five years, that a half-dozen Windows 3.1 machines still connect to and use every day.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I have a 30 year old reel-to-reel that's survived battery acid being accidentally dumped into the air vent, and a Commie 64 that's survived a 7 foot fall onto a concrete floor.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
I did some work for Cray at one point and I had
a gander at a big vector machine (perhaps it was
an SVC 1), but I can't recall. It weighed an
enormous amount (tonnes I guess) and had a very
hardy chassis. My tour guide informed me that it
was designed to survive falling out of an
aircraft during take off or landing.
Poor runway.
Get there and this thing is a beast. The printer frame was cast aluminum about the same size and strength as the intake manifold and heads on a Chevy V8 engine. The computer itself was made of 1" steel square tubing that was like a quarter inch thick, the bolts that held it together looked like something you would use on a house. The hard drive was a single platter, and the base housing was cast bronze or something, weighed about 20 - 25 lbs or so, about the size of a current ATX desktop case, and the motor for the drive was a monster 220V electric motor about the size of a small pumpkin - half horsepower maybe?
It's really a shame that you had to trash that machine, it sounds really nice.
Texas Instruments used to build computers like that, even for domestic use. Remember the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A? The $99 console that you could buy a K-Mart? They were built like tanks, too.
Most impressive was the TI-99/4A PES (Peripheral Expansion System). It was a big steel box housing a power supply, a backplane, and a Shugart 5.25" single-side single-density disk drive - 90K per floppy!
TI made a fundamental mistake in their assumptions about computer-buying consumers. They assumed that consumers were idiots who weren't interested in doing more than playing games, writing BASIC programs, and balancing the checkbook. Consequently, TI didn't release the Assembly programming kit ("Editor/Assembler") until almost too late, and tried to keep all the details of the very weird, very minicomputerish hardware secret.
Part of the assumption was that, if Joe Consumer installs hardware, he's going to do it wrong. So they made it impossible to install the hardware wrong. All the accessory cards for the PES included on-board ROM chips with drivers; the machine had true plug-and-play capabilities. And because Joe Consumer is apt to try to put a square peg into a round hole, they made it impossible to install the cards incorrectly without using power tools.
How? They housed all the cards in cast aluminum cases.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Wow, it survived thrrough that?
My chemical engineering buddy's PC got burnt to hell after trying to plug a new HD into his system before turning it off. A capacitor popped on the old one and the motherboard's IDE controller was shot to hell. Doing this before handing in his final project before graduation was a big NO-NO! So, he plugged the old drive into his roommate's computer and needless to say, it didn't work.
So, he took the old case with all the drives and components in it (he wanted to get a new PC anyways - this was his excuse), forcefully hucking it off of our fire escape, down three stories, making it cartwheeling on asphalt, and repeating the process, allowing everyone on our floor to get a throw. Well,
the case's aluminium didn't even bend! So, he got a sledgehammer out of the truck and we all took turns beating the hell out of it - reminiscent of that scene from Office Space - crushing the motherboard and power supply, capacitors flying off the board, plastic and metal shards flying all over the place.
We had several onlookers, then a couple campus police officers came by. Oops. They looked at us and said, "You engineers, always causing a ruckus, can we take a few whacks at it? Bill's wife has been cheating on him."
"Pass the sledgehammer!"
I bought a MS Natural Keyboard (sorry, but I can't find any better) about four years ago, and within a couple of months I'd knocked a glass of Coke over it, so went to PC World and bought a new one for 35 (> $50!!). The next time it happened I figured I should save some money and fix it.
:-)
So I opened it up, wiped all the plastic plates down, and cleaned it up.. all worked fine. Great!
So, this keyboard is now almost four years old, but looks like brand new. I've spilled water/coke/OJ/food into it at least six times, and after dismantling and cleaning it, it always comes back AOK.
The only problems are the space bar isn't as mechanically responsive as it once was, and I lost the num lock/caps lock/scroll lock lights.. but all seems to work okay
As a comparison, my Microsoft optical mouse only lasted two years..
mogorific carpentry experiments
Hey, a few things to add to the list:
1. The INOVA X5 flashlight (first version, no moving parts save the head, which you turn to turn on the lights) is incredibly durable, people always asked about it and I always said that yes, you could run it over with a car and it would still work fine, you could drop it and it wouldn't matter. Eventually someone called my bluff, so I had this guy throw it into the air and not catch it out in the parking lot. Flashlight is fine, concrete slightly scuffed.
2. Texas Instruments TI-99 4A. I got one for $2.50 at a garage sale, it had done time in a leaky attic, tons of rust and corrosion on any exposed contacts. hooked it up, turned on the TV, plugged in Munch Man and it ran great.
3. There was a Mac Peforma 6360 at a Mac store where I once worked. The office it was in caught fire somehow and the computer's case was mostly burned to a crisp. The monitor died, the Mac looked like hell and the plastic casing sealed off the floppy and CD-ROM drives. But it still runs! The data was saved and the Mac was kept as a proof of those old machines' durability. I figure it lived because it has the metal chassis to hold everything together inside, a metal case around that to keep the radiation in, and then another tough beige plastic shell outside that.
4. Original iPod. My friend has two original 5GB iPods, both of which are (as are all iPods after a day or so) rather badly scratched. They've both been dropped on a variety of surfaces, had water spilled on them, and one has been taken apart completely after the mechanical scroll wheel died. The way to fix the scroll wheels, apparently, is to press very hard and turn it a lot, this seemed to clean the contacts 1n this one iPod.
5. My ghetto Mac. The board and CPU come from a beige G3 tower that was dropped from a considerable height. The case was so badly damaged that it was held together with packing tape when I bought it (for a very good price). There was no heat sink on the 300Mhz CPU so I had to find one, and being a total n00b back in the day I went to the Shack. That was $28 that ended up snapping the plastic ZIF socket. Krazy Glue to the rescue. The case was salvaged from a PC store, it had been taken to pieces and is really just a frame to hold all the parts, having no side or top panels. This machine has taken a LOT of abuse, because back in the day I didn't know how to configure IDE hard drives so everything spent a lot of time being plugged into the wrong busses in the wrong order. I forgot to plug the VRM in a few times, and the RAM chips always had a different speed for each of them. It's been unplugged, power surged, dropped, had things dropped on it, the power supply has been overloaded and shorted out twice, and it's even electrocuted me. I killed it (totally dead, no boot, won't see drives, etc.) and then brought it back three or four times so far. It's still a work in progress, and I've been slowly adding features and stickers and shiny things (EL cable, rounded IDE cables, giant Mercedes star taken from a junkyard, etc.) and now, with a better video card, two monitors, awesome Yamaha speakers, a FireWire/USB card, an Apple Pro Keyboard, a Microsoft optical trackball, a combo drive and a way-overkill 80GB/8MB hard drive as well as a 6GB startup drive, it's still my main machine, over three years later. Runs 10.2.8 fast enough, though it crashes more often than it should. Insanely durable though, and I'm surprised that such an ancient machine (1997-8 or so) can actually run the newest OS and peripherals without any serious problems or conflicts.
The original Commodore 64. Seriously. I've dropped two of those old bastards down a flight of stairs once while moving, and they still worked then, and work to this day. Those things will outlast any of us, they were built so sturdy.
I remember back in high school we had a cluster of several Vaxen. I'd like to say at least four, and as many as six.
Well, waste lines were apparently run through that room. Granted, this is a school of 4000 students. The way the school was sectioned off, I doubt it was the only one, but there's still a big portion of stuff going through this.
Apparently, the pipe burst, and emptied itself more or less directly on the Vaxen, which were 6xxx series cabinets.
Unbelievably, most survived.
-----
When i experimented with some TL741 opamp IC's, i once mixed up the + and - supplies, it took me a minute or so to notice it. The circuit didnt work offcourse and while troubleshooting i noticed the chips was too hot to touch. After putting the supplies in the correct order it worked fine. Well i used that same opamp as an RFI detector for my tesla coil and other HV apparatus. Well one time i made an plasma globe with an lightbulb and checked it out. Well checking the circuit out, i suddenly saw arcs flying from an exposed transformer lead to the probe. It killed the led, but the opamp still worked.
I had my foot run over in a pair three years ago, and escaped unscathed. I still wear the same ones too.
I have an old Tadpole microSparc laptop. It is a very solid piece of equipment. Most of it is encased in steel, and the keyboard is very rugged. The backlit 640x480 LCD is well-protected on the back and sides by this heavy case, unlike the flimsy plastic on the back of a lot of them these days.
Well, one day I was working into the dark hours, and put some stuff on the ground so I could get at the trunk of my car. I blindly groped around in the dark for the stuff I was putting in, closed up and got in the car to leave. I hit a bump, and for a second I thought I hit one of the neighborhood cats. I got out, and I was sickened to find I had run over my tadpole.
One corner was heavily abraded by the pavement, and the bag it was in had holes in it. I opened it up, and it powered on with no problems. I hope someday I can afford a recent model. These are build like tanks. Well, I don't really know how tanks are built, but if they are built like this thing, I would feel very safe in one.
got ahold of my dell laptop a couple months ago. I think she was pissed at me cause she pissed on my laptop. Right on the keyboard ( I had left in on the floor for some reason ). Trust me, she drenched that thing. Anyway, I set it aside for a couple weeks, fired it up the other day and it still works like a charm. Oh and i dropped it like three times. I swear it's a champ.
Horrendously bored at work (yay, call centers...), so please bear with my stress relief.
...and there was much rejoicing.
(Pseudoepic)
Ho, valiant warriors of the technical world, thou arcane and wise mages of the electron flow! Hark to mine telling of days gone by...when sysadmin were feared user tamers, and managers oft cowered quietly in their dens; afear'd of treading where daemon do toil.
In the days past, there existed a quiet mecca of thought, known as the Ewe of Eh. T'was a middling realm of unreality, hedged close by all around by the sleepy town of E-ville. A peaceful place, with the sleepy air only interrupted by the Guild of the Gheers and the Cults of the Aggs with their yearly revelry and beer bash (and Lady Godiva ride). Therein was a small group of codebabies, the Ewe-Aks (http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/), whose den was a small and twisted place, lit by the light of the CRTs and filled with the sounds of ABBA.
In the days before they discovered they needed insurance, every year there was held an event; a meeting of fellow thinkers. There met the Beck, the Bart, the Senda, and many others. Food and drink was provided aplenty; much 'za and beer was doled out by the younger apprentices. The goal of the night: to do mighty battle with old computer equipment...with a fire axe.
Many an old monitor met a shattering death; bright, sparkling bits scattered across the rugs. Old workhorses where brought in to do battle, and left fit naught for the heap.
Then there came the day of the Sparc. T'was an unassuming beast, flat of stature and wide of hips. Placed on the slaughter floor, lots were drawn to kill the beast. The victor raised high the axe, and with a mighty blow, struck it....and bounced.
I jest not, for the blade of the axe bounced back up like a rabbit a'frightened. The Sparc sat there, nary but a light scratch on the plastic surface. A second blow, heavier than the first did no more damage.
The blade was handed to another of a larger stature...and the Sparc merely sat there smugly, shouldering off blow after blow of the axe with but nicks and scratches the sole result.
They handed the blade to one of the largest. A fat man, of great girth and height, of many a stone in weight. Laughing, he swore he'd slay the beast. In front of the scoffing crowd, he raised the blade high, and brought it down. With a resounding smack...the blade bounced. In the deepening silence, the man looked distraught, for the case had shrugged off the blow like mud from a senator. Now angry, he raised the blade again, when the Beck did cry "Go for the soft underbelly!" The fat man did pause, and flip the beast, dire intent to rend the beast's copper guts. With a mighty yell, he smote the belly...and hung the blade up on the thick sheet metal skin. Baffled he wrenched and roll'd, tossing his weight back and forth until the blade wrenched loose. Laughing in anger, he flipped the beast again, and set himself. Leaping into the air, yelling madly, he brought the blade down; the weight of countless late night coding sessions bringing snarling vengeance upon the case..., which only cracked...lightly.
The Bart did rise, smug of purpose, and claiming the axe from the fat, besaddened man, did take his stance. Flipping the blade around, so that the blunt end would be his tool, he did set himself. He raised the blade. He swung. With a mighty shattering, the Sparc did finally go to its final reward, shrapnelling the air with the fragments of its inch-thick polycarbonate, honeycombed shell.
So hear well, ARCane wizards... Beware the Sun Sparc...for the beast is hard shelled, and sure of its construction. Do not underestimate it, like the man of weight did, ere you too will hear the derision of your peers...
(/Pseudoepic)
Bloody thing. Kudos to Sun for building a machine that can take a blow from an axe backed by the weight of a 460lb man.
The original model, dating from 1983 or so, with no raised buttons, just the flat control surface see here for details and pix). I saw one last week that had been gigged heavily for years, was missing chunks of its keys. There were screws rattling around inside from previous "repairs", yet it was still working and sounding as good as a DX7 Mk.1 can. (Not a patch on my Kawai K5000S, though...)
(this is not a