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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 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.
See here
I really hate Dan Patrick.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.