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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.
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.
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.
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.
The winner and still champion
www.eFax.com are spammers
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Good point. I too have a HP that fell from 5-6 feet on concrete on several occasions. The case gets a few scratches every time, but that's it. I saw other people's HP survive some bad treatment too. After all, these are the calculators that engineers take to space (traditionally)!
I hear that newer models (those with the funky colors) are much weaker. There are reports of them falling from two feet on a carpet and having their screen destroyed.
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
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
Some people may have a different opinion: Dead 49G.
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 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.
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.
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.
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