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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.
That was one for the record books.
See here
I really hate Dan Patrick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
So, what you're saying is that you used company time and company resources to destroy company hardware, then you link to your resume in your sig...
I've been doing it all wrong. Let me know how it works out.
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
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.
(laughing in astonished horror) This guy needs a laptop that's got some rubber armor or something!
No, he needs a desktop.
Or an etch-a-sketch.
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 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.