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Abused, But Working Hardware Stories?
RPI Geek writes "Everyone's heard the stories about people who, knowingly or unknowingly, abuse their computers. Personally, I've had a faulty power supply literally burn a hole through the motherboard, with the only ill effects being a dead PCI slot and USB ports. I'm curious as to what kind of abuse fellow /.ers have done or seen done to electronics while the hardware still worked afterwards. Soldered a broken keyboard PCB back together so that it worked fine? Taken sticks of RAM out of a running computer to see when it would notice? Overclocked a 386... to 386MHz? I'm interested in hearing any stories about abused-but-working hardware."
So far I've done the following while my PC was running:
- Removed RAM. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Inserted PCI cards. Windows died. Reboot. Problem solved.
- Removed PCI cards. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped hard drives. Windows survived.
- Hot-swapped CD/DVD drives. Windows survived.
My power supply and mobo must be very fault-tolerant, I suppose, because other systems have not taken a liking to this behavior. I have an Enermax 350W and an Asus P4C800-E. Currently I own two SATA hard drives. According to the standards group, SATA is "hot-swappable." Given my previous activities, I can verify their claims.
Obviously, the system did not enjoy having its RAM removed. And while it did not mind the removal of a PCI card, it froze up solid when I inserted a new one. A quick reboot took care of that.
I've also dropped my iPod about 5-6 times, and it still keeps on ticking!
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
I've connected something running off an ac outlet that wasn't isolated to a programming board. It blew a pretty big hole in the cpu. And it stopped working....
Back in 1996 I built a dual Pentium Pro computer in an SKB music case (for rackmounted music gear) as a luggable computer. After a few years the thing was pretty antiquated, so when I had to move from Europe back to the US I decided to doom the thing to the fates and have it travel back with me with my luggage, facing the perils of baggage handling. It just wasn't worth taking any extra precautions. I knew the thing wouldn't survive the trip, but I didn't want to throw it out. It had no shock protection at all, and I didn't place any fragile stickers on it or anything. After the trip I opened the case up to find the CPUs and memory sticks had unseated themselves and been knocking around inside the case, many of the CPU pins were bent this way and that. The memory seemed scratched but otherwise ok. some of the chips mounted on the motherboards seem to have suffered the impacts of the CPUs flying about (some bent wires going to the chips). Just to see what would happen I straightened the wires, pins, re-seated the memory, and turned it on. The damn thing worked fine. And went on to live an unexpected few years as a file server. I'm not sure what lesson I learned, I suppose that computers can be far more robust than I expect (but only when I don't expect it).
Don't vote for Eugene Papansanovich for Congress!
Well, this was unintentional, but I had a 60 Mhz Pentium and after a couple of years decided to replace it. I bought some new components and opened up the case to pull the memory and found the heat sink lying at the bottom of the case. It had completely fallen off at some point in the past. Strangely, there were never any symptoms and it worked fine the whole time.
A while ago, I needed some cheap 1U servers... I decided to use some cheap motherboards with "onboard everything"... There was just one problem. The sound port did not fit in a 1U rack cabinet. The solution was to fetch the soldering iron and remove it. It worked!
thomasdamgaard.dk.
How about that! Got a guy who took a trashed P4, solder some 24 guage wire on to create a pin and is using the CPU now. I am quite amazed at the man's skill. I for one can't do crap with a soldering iron except ruin things.
I plugged an 18 volt AC adapter into 6 volt computer speakers. They made a really high pitched sound before they popped and spewed lots and lots of acidy smoke.
We later found the correct AC adapter, plugged them back in, and to our surprise, both speakers worked just fine. It makes you wonder what useless part broke in the speakers, and why that part was in there to begin with.
I often soap up and hose off old gear and it all works fine. You need to let it dry for a couple of days, though. Never lost a PC that way.
Hey, I just thought of something! You know how toaster ovens say DO NOT IMMERSE? Well, if you DO immerse them, water gets into the heating tubes, which are filled with compressed poweder magnesium oxide. It takes a very long time to dry, more than a few days. If you decide to plug the thing in because it LOOKS dry, the water in the tubes turns to steam, which cannot escape fast enough, and the tubes RIIIPPP open from end to end, blasting powdered MgO all over the place.
That would be a funny prank, huh?
Several years ago I had my PC's setup in a shed. The shed was well setup with power and lights, and one day I was doing a motherboard transplant (swapping a 386dx40 with a 486dx2/66 from memory).
I didnt get it finished so i left both my desktop PC's with the covers off and went to bed.
That night there was rain (as usual) but it was also severely windy - enough to blow the rain at enough of an angle so it went under the eave section and straight onto my desk.
I got up in the morning and found both PCs and motherboards completely soaked and water pooled everywhere. Turned them upside down, dried them as best I could and left them (inside the house this time) for 2 days. When I powered them up they both worked, without a hitch and continued to work for years afterwards.
(one mouse was dead though - a small price to pay)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Back when memory was around $100/megabyte the school I was attending received some donated hardware that included one non-functioning 1 MB SIMM. Rather than toss $100 in the trash, I examined the SIMM and found a broken pin on the side of one of the chips. Using a battered soldering iron and a length of cold solder to replace the pin, I managed to get a good enough connection to restore the SIMM to operation. It functioned perfectly in a 486SX machine for several years afterward. I also managed to upgrade that same machine to a DX (MMU and FPU added) by salvaging a 486DX chip off another dead motherboard installing it in a cleverly included socket on the SX motherboard and disabling the onboard chip via jumper settings. This was before the ZIF socket, so the amount of force and screw driver based prying required to first remove and then install that 486DX chip could easily have killed it.
Luck was definitely required in the days of expensive parts, and $0 technology budgets.
I'd like to say we later installed Linux on that machine and used it to run our first web server, but alas, we used it for playing deathmatch Doom after the computer lab was closed. That's why we needed 4MB of memory and a FPU.
We had two laptops with us in our vehicle traveling in an unnamed country. Hostile fire ensued from the side of the road and penetrated our vehicle in places (not uparmored), missed everyone inside. After the rather quick return to the safehouse, we discovered rounds had hit our water bottles and our laptops. Panasonic toughbook was dead, dead, dead while the Powerbook had a hole right through the top of the case destroying the LCD and penetrating into the optical drive where the round came to rest, but.....I plugged the trusty Powerbook in, hooked up an external monitor and it fired right up whereupon I was able to file my reports.
One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In this case while connecting the sound cable from the CDROM to the sound card (which I had forgotten to do when I installed the drive) the metal d-ring on my plastic watch band shorted a +5v pin on the sound card to ground resulting in a burnt a trace on the motherboard. I soldered a wire across the burn (after it was OFF) and all was well again. The machine had a long well used life, and is now retired to the position of household fileserver.
I have since gone to using VELCRO watch straps.
I work in hardware/firmware development - bringing up new boards and building firmware on hacked-to-all-hell prototypes. I've soldered on stuff while it's running. I've swapped cpu, memory, pcmcia, and other components while the system is running. I'll run my feet across the carpet on purpose to test ESD tolerance... shorting signals on purpose because it's easier than cutting a trace and wiring the input to ground. It is amazing how much of a beating like this a system can take for months or years on end and still run perfectly. It does not surprise me at all when people talk about systems that have caught fire but still mostly work.
Now one of my favorite stories: a friend of mine worked for AlphaSmart - they make inexpensive portable word processors - really PC keyboards with memory. He said they got a report of a woman in India who had run her alphasmart through the dishwasher to clean some gummed up keys.
If you think about it it's not surprising... the equipment they use to clean PCBs at the factory is pretty much the same as a home dishwasher - just different solvents I guess.
I have that beat.
.45 while trying to end his crime spree.
An armed robber broke into my house, collected various valuables, put my TI SR-51II calc into his chest pocket, and I shot it with my
Bullet went thru the padded case, bounced off the manual, and into his chest. The calculator was not even dented.
I should make a jacket of those old TIs.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I had an Asus MediaBus card that I needed to fit into a small case. Now, MediaBus cards are mixed ISA/PCI cards - "slot saver" types. They're a normal PCI card with an extension for the ISA bits.
The one I had was a SCSI card with an ISA sound card onboard. I needed the SCSI card, but it wouldn't fit. Looking at the card, it became pretty clear that the ISA sound bits were mostly on the end of the card, and if they weren't there the card would fit. It wasn't going to be any use to me if it didn't fit, so out came the tin snips (!!).
After this butchery, it worked fine - despite the somewhat ragged, sheared line across the back of the card and the fact that I'd cut all the ISA-extension connectors off.
Actually, I forgot the time my SNES got tossed across the room into the wall and still survived, except for a chip in the case and a slightly bent RF cable.
In the dim, dark past, intel machines didn't have an FPU on die. You could buy an exernal floating point processor, which was most commonly installed by the store that sold the machine.
Well, Compaq made a system where the the main processor along with all the other chips were mounted so that the letter was right-side up when standing at the front of the machine.
However, the coprocessor socket was rotated 90 degrees. If you installed it so the lettering was the same as everything else, one of the pins melted off when power was applied. Don't ask me how I know.
great design.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Well, we got a batch that we just couldn't get installed. Tried the cards on a few different systems, different bios settings trying to force irq's and whatnot, but not a thing. We declared them all defective (being a 17 year old kid working as a co-op student mind you), and decided to go with the tried and true Sound Blaster pci's instead. We then proceeded to take some of the Sonic Impacts and play frisbee, use them as coasters and ridiculously large keychain items.
Years later I'm assembling spare parts to make a secondary system, and realize I have no sound card to put in it. All I have are isa cards, and this motherboard is without an isa slot. So I go rummaging in my room and of course what do I find but a well worn Diamond Sonic Impact. I figure what the hell, and toss the thing into the box. On first reboot XP found the card, and proceeded to lock up while installing it's drivers.. On second reboot the drivers completed, but windows core dumped shortly after. Third time was a charm though, and I still can't believe this thing produces sound after what I did to it.
Try removing/inserting an ISA card in a running machine sometime, it works flawlesly in anything w/ isapnp (win95,nt4,linux,etc) I'm sure it wasn't intentional when they layed out the ISA spec, but it works with the addidion of plug and play to the equation.
Turned out that there was a current in the shield of the coax. Why? Because the outlet that one of the boxes was plugged into was miswired. 110 volts running between the computers for months, maybe even a year.
When I realized what was going on, I shut both PCs down and repaired the faulty outlet. Both booted right up. The problem that I was troubleshooting never appeared again.
I set a full glass of water on an old Commodore 1541 disk drive. I then knocked it over and the entire glass of water poured into the drive via the top air vents. After drying for a few days it worked fine for years to come.
Spilled a glass of grape juice (real stuff, not cool aid) into the keyboard of my Commodore 128 computer. Again, after some washing and drying it worked fine. Well, except some keys would stay depressed if you were not real light with the typing.
My friend tried to overclock a his near new Amiga 3000. While trying to desolder a chip he managed to yank it off, along with a half dozen traces off the motherboard. He ripped apart some speaker wire, resoldered the lines and it booted up fine.
While working at a computer dealer, a co-worker tried to replace a hard drive on some IBM machine. Problem was it LOOKED like IDE but was really some wacky mainframe thing. When turned on, about 5 of the wires in the IDE cable turned red hot and exploded into flame. The HD was toast, but the computer was fine once the right HD was ordered from IBM.
While using my trusty old Pentium II I heard a SCSI drive inside make a PING-PING-PING and a horrid grinding noise as the platters ground to a halt. Opening up the drive case revealed a read write head had somehow come loose and gotten wedged under the arm against a platter. Carved a nice circular trench in the disk platter.
Umm, guess the last one isn't a survival story. But I did have backups...
I've noticed the exact same thing with my 12" PowerBook. (The new 1.33 GHz model) I fractured my left wrist at the start of summer, so for the past few weeks I've been in a brace while it's finishing up healing. I was in a rush one day, so rather than make two trips to my car, I foolishly carried my PowerBook in my left hand while carrying the heavier parts of my load in my good right hand. I lost my grip with my left and narrowly missed grabbing the PowerBook with my right hand before it hit the ground. There was a pretty loud thud, and I thought it was a goner.
Much to my surprise and delight, it worked flawlessly when I opened it up. It was sleeping, and it was ready for use near instantaneously like you expect from an Apple laptop. It had landed on the corner by the power and Ethernet ports, and sure enough the case crumpled noticeably. However, I can still plug into both ports (not sure about the modem jack though), so I haven't bothered hammering out the dents yet since they are only cosmetic.
I must applaud Apple for excellent laptop design. After seeing what happened to my laptop, I suspected that they had designed the case to be a crumple zone. Your story confirms my theory. If I'm faced with the worst case scenario being paying $50-$100 for case repair to a dropped laptop, I'll take that any day of the week over having to get a new mobo at first drop.
I awoke in a panic, with just barely enough time to make it to pick up my Mom in time. I raced outside, jumped in the car, and tried to back out of the driveway. The car wouldn't move. I thought it was just a snowdrift, so I pressed harder on the gas. Still no good. So, I pulled forward a little and got up some speed in reverse. After a few more attempts, I finally managed to make it over this huge hill. I looked at the mass in the car's headlights. As my eyes adjusted, the horror of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Lying on the ground in front of me was my laptop's bag, with my laptop and several floppy disk cases full of floppy disks.
What I had done was so overwhelming that I did not even try to feel an emotion. I just picked up my laptop and carefully placed it in the back seat of the car.
When I had the chance, I checked out the results of the evening. The LCD screen was fractured down the middle and the case was split down the middle. As I balanced each half of my laptop on my lap, I turned on the power. To my surprise, she booted up. One thumb-sized piece of the screen revealed the DOS prompt.
I still have that laptop, though, of course, I have not used it very much since then. I was able to perform some important data transfer operations with it, though, relying entirely on memory of what the computer should be displaying in response to each of my inputs. Most of the 3.5-inch floppies came out OK, too, though a few were unusable due to their shutters being welded into the plastic. The floppy disk cases cracked a little, but I still use them, too.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
A spot of background: Wycliff Bible Translators is a charity that has set out to provide a translation of the Christian Bible in every language on Earth. This includes, of course, thousands of languages that have no written form, so part of their work involves volunteer linguists traveling to remote parts of the planet to create written languages for tribes and teaching them literacy in their own tongue.
... and the PDP 11/40 was still chugging along, happy as can be. Now, obviously they panicked and got the air conditioning fixed as quickly as possible. But they did prove that at least this one PDP 11 could run for at least a week at temperatures in the 160F to 180F range.
Back in the late 1970s, I did some volunteer programming for them. At the time, translation support ran on a PDP 11/40 that was installed in the cargo hold of this aging steamship that they owned; they'd sail to the port nearest to the next tribe they were working for, teams would collect dictionary words, create orthographic phonetic spellings for them, and send them back to the ship to be collated for the dictionary, then printed out and sent back out to the teachers and translators. The rest of the ship had no air conditioning, so they built a climate-controlled computer room below decks, with orders to people that they were only to enter on the rare occasions that a magnetic tape needed to be changed.
Unbeknownst to them, the air conditioning failed as soon as they left port and never actually turned on. When they went in to change a tape while docked in Rio de Janeiro, they found that the temperature in the computer room had risen to somewhere in the close vicinity of 180F
But then, what can I say about 1970s DEC hardware? The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really - that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.
Computers may have been expensive back then, and huge, and we thought that 128k of RAM was a lot, but boy could they take a beating, at least if you bought them from Digital Equipment Corporation.
I put my computer together on the kitchen table, stood nervously looking at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned on the power. There was an immediate loud POP, and half of a capacitor made an arc that took it across the kitchen. A cloud of bright pink smoke rose up from the shattered capacitor as a small flame burned from the capacitor. I quickly turned off the power and blew out the fire. After I calmed down and looked over my setup carefully, I found that I had plugged the AT power supply cable one pin over on the AT power supply plug. I adjusted the cable and turned my computer on, again. To my surprise, my computer worked! It was a beautiful sight!
I still have that computer (in fact, she is on the table behind me right now, watching me type this). She still works when I turn her on, but I have to adjust the system date to less-than 2000. She is not Y2K compliant.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The iDX4/100 CPU that was supposed to be powered by 3.3v but was configured by the vendor without the motherboard's voltage regulator module, so was running off 5.0v (I fought to have them replace it anyway).
The sound board that needed a new edge connector fitted after I slipped on some stairs whilst carrying it, landed on it and ripped the old connector off, together with some tracks.
The PCs that were under a leaking air conditioning unit at a former employer and got soaked in water and/or coolant. Once dried out, they worked (mostly) and were given the hostnames 'itchy' and 'scratchy' in order to make people suitably nervous about using them for anything important. One of them even had a failing hard disc, so I partitioned around the failed sectors.
The 17" CRT monitor that was dropped (NOT by me!) down some stairs in 1998 whilst the same employer was moving buildings. It acquired a large crack in the case, but is still working fine.
The M68000 CPU that had several pins bent and re-bent whilst I was attempting to fit it to a new socket on an Amiga accelerator card (that in turn fitted into the original CPU socket on the Amiga motherboard).
--
I'm writing this post on a Dell Dimension 8250 that was in a basement when the watermain in the front yard blew, filling the basement to a depth of about two feet for about eight hours. Yep, completely submerged. Thing sat on the back step for a week before I got to it. Scrubbed everything down with an old toothbrush (the insides looked like they'd been spraypainted with rust-coloured paint), and blew everything out with compressed air. The HDD was shot (no real surprise there), but *everything* else works just fine, including the CDRW and the Radeon 9700.
Tune In, Turn Up, Geck Out.
The best bit of abuse I have seen was on an IBM Model 55, it was functioning as one of our Eicon X25 Gateway's so was pretty vital to our day to day operations.
It had a dodgy hard disk that would randomly crash and freeze the system, after a reboot, you would get a disk0 failure code, the solution we found was to remove the HDD (IBM had a great quick remove option with the 55 where you did not need to take the cover off it just slid out the front - ahead of it's time really!) and gently tap it on the desk/wall/co-workers head, reinsert and power up, if this did not work remove it again and tap it somewhat harder. The true elite support guys knew just how hard to hit it to get it working first time.
After about 2 years of this 'system' the old girl finally gave up the ghost and no amount of slamming it against the desk worked, so seeing as they had nothing to loose the guys cracked the disk open, breaking the vacuum seal, and spun the platters round by hand!!!, reassembled, reboot - it worked fine!! I kid you not, I still to this day do not know how it worked after such abuse, imagine it was a bit like the bumble bee!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Friends of mine had an atari (1024st or something like that) that didn't fit in the case they wanted it in. So they cut the board into two pieces, placed the pieces in the case at an angle of 90 degrees and resoldered all cut wiring. The atari still worked.
Back In 98' my brother and I took a brand new 1.5 megapixel camera $300, a fairly good camera back then. and desoldered the optical reciever chip and soldered a long ribbon cable to it and the camera. We fitted this optical chip to an old Canon A4 and made a digital camera with interchangable lenses. It work perfect other than the length of cable threw off the color a little bit.
It's late, so I'm pretty sure this will get lost in the din, but....
I was at a computer repair shop, and I noticed that all the counters were covered with cheap, commercial-grade carpet. It was a dry day, and I shocked myself several times just moving about.
So, I asked the guy (the owner) at the shop about this, and problems with ESD (Electro-Static Discharge) with the carpeted counter tops.
He laughed. On the counter was a high-dollar memory tester. He grabbed a then-expensive 4 MB 30 Pin SIMM and, holding it in one hand, walked around the room, dragging his feet. He did this until (No kidding) his own hair was beginning to stick up.
Then, holding one end of the SIMM, he walked over to a doorknob, and threw a 1", bright blue spark directly thru the simm to the doorknob.
He then calmly walked over to the memory tester, and ran tests on it. It ran for 5 minutes with a hitch.
I don't worry much about ESD, and haven't for years, with no trouble. The problems I have are with stressing the parts - putting undue stress on a MB when inserting a RAM stick, for example.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They are at it again!
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Spirit's right hand side front wheel is damaged (drawing about 2-3 times more power than all the others - they think its a problem with particles in the gear chain).
Those incredible folks over at Nasa are currently looking at how to carry on without it (it can still operate but only when absolutely necessary).
They have been practicing driving in reverse and dragging the limp wheel along.
This in itself wouldn't be a major issue if the machine were under direct human control, but they are currently rewriting the operating commands for its autonomous driving mode - hazard avoidance etc.
How many others go to the trouble of rewriting the OS to work around a hardware disability?
Heres a link: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20040716
liqbase
Last year I was passing some cars going.. fast.. and after passing the first one I saw a cop car on the side of the road. So I hit the brakes and slowed from about 130km/h to 80 or 90. There was a guy also bassing right on my tail (Polish roads) and didn't notice the police or that I slowed down. I only heard his tires squeal and when I looked in the mirror I just saw the poor Fiat Punto punt the back of my Opel Vectra - hard. Well, I just saw the Punto start to hit me, and then my head got slammed back into the headrest. A Dell Latitude laptop was in the trunk. The trunk went in about 40cm from the impact even though there was a tow hook installed.
During the damage check, I booted up the laptop. No problems. The Punto and the Vectra had severe damage. The Vectra still runs, but I doubt the Punto was good for anything but parts.
While the laptop was in a protective laptop bag, the impact was still severe. Mind you, the braking probably sent the laptop flying right up to the back of the back seat and the impact sent it flying back, so the impact was probably not directly absorbed by the laptop against the trunk wall.
J
My first "real" PC (as in I was the primary user, parents bought it knowing I'd likely be the only one on it) was an IBM Aptiva, the first "Windows 95" PC from IBM I believe - we bought it just after Win 95 came it, it was so new that some models still came with Windows 3.11 and came with a rebate for a free Win 95 disk. Anyone else remember how truly apallingly horrible those early releases of Windows 95 was? *Shivers*
/melted/ together. It must have been lightning they said. It wouldn't boot because the disks could not spin. Thankfully it was under warrenty, so we got a new HD. Bump up in size, from a monsterously large 1.6 gig (all my friends had under a gig, so it really was huge then) to a unbelievable 2.5 gig. Wahoo!
Anyways...a bit into a year later, after a heavy lightning and thunderstorm, the thing wouldn't turn on the next day. We had a powerstrip but not a surge protector of anysort, let alone a UPS. It simply wouldn't boot. I don't really recall the moment when lightning struck, but after a repair guy had a look it was found that the metal disks within the hard drive had
To my utter suprise everything else was fine, the CPU, RAM, you name it - fine. Not a damn thing wrong with the other components. Its dead now, hollowed out as I stole parts from it for other boxes, but I'm sure if I wanted to it would still run if I simply added back some stuff. Its amazing, as faulty and buggy as software often is, hardware - good hardware at least - can be amazingly resilent.
Except this baby seems to work just fine.
Circa 1978, when I was 11, I had a great little Z-80 box, an Exidy Sorcerer (2 mhz or so, 32K RAM, but I hacked it to 48!!!) Anyhow, it had no sound. Jealous of those Apple II owners who could make various beeps, I hooked a speaker directly to the +5 and GND contacts on the parallel port. By toggling the port, I could make all manner of sounds. I even hooked up my tape recorder and mic to a parallel port input line, and with the volume set right, recorded and played back voice and audio. Worked for years, never fried anything!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
A few years ago a classmate dropped his TI-82 about three floors through the hole in the middle of a spiral staircase. The poor calculator landed on a marble floor and the front and back panels got separated. He just popped them back in place, and the thing worked as if nothing had happened. I'm quite amazed the display didn't break.
Martin
Hmm, let's see what I can find in the back of my head at this hour....
;))! So we would do voltage readings with multimeters on the ISA/EISA ports and on the PSU pins with a back probe while it was on and connected to a HD/CD. So after we finished, me and my partner got curious and started tripping pins with the back probe wire we had. Eventually we found out how to trip the PSU and shut it off due to a short we found across the ISA socket. We kept doing this over and over, moved on to removing RAM while it was one and pulling the power on the IDE devices and stuff. We didn't blow anything up that time but everything seemed to work fine after.
1. Back doing some PC tech stuff in a class I took a couple years ago back in high school, we had a couple P1 and 386/486 mobos around, so the teacher would have us use those, god forbid we touch the P3(smart guy haha
2. This wasn't me but another group in my electronics class in HS. We were doing more voltage testing on PSUs in our basic electronics class this time, and 2 smart guys decided to take paper clips and metal wires and stick them inside the AT PSUs while they were on. An explosion, lotsa sparks, tripped circuit breakers, and a pissed teacher later we found that the PSU had still worked, just 2 of the IDE power plug didn't work.
3. My friend had purchased a little 1.53GHz P4 CPU, and bought a very cheap motherboard, some offbrand name. Well as he was driving around crazily like usual, the the CPU unit was in his trunk upside down so the CPU/heatsink was hanging. You all know how heavy those P4 heatsinks are! So the heatsink clip breaks off the motherboard, and goes crashing around for another 10 min till he gets to my house. When he brings it over, he notices that his computer keeps shutting down, we open it up, look inside, and the CPU was burning hot besides the fact the heatsink was off. We saw the heatsink did plenty of damage and knocked dings all over the case but didn't touch any chipsets luckily. Our solution was simple......duct tape! Yes he had that heatsink somehow strapped down tightly with duct tape. Don't ask me how he did it, but I was afraid the tape would somehow catch fire. Sure enough he gave it to me recently after he upgraded for a server. I took the heatsink off and to my suprise the CPU came out too! The thermal grease basically glued it to the heatsink, so I had to take a flat head screwdriver and pry it off. It went flying a bit, bent a pin or two, I fixed them, put it back together, and walla it worked!
4. Someone at my dad's office who worked in the field somehow dropped one of those rugged outdoor special laptops off a 2 story building. It went flying to the ground with a thud landing LCD screen open flat onto the ground. As you can imagine the guy was pretty much ghost white. They rushed down to check it out, turns out that the thing survived! Perfectly, there was no damage to any components, just the RF wireless network access antena was a flimsy aluminum strip, it bent in half, but still worked!
5. At a small buisness I had worked for a while, had a server in the back storage room that backed up their tax files (it was some tax/investment buisness). There was no AC back there so they left the side window open that just opened 6" to a tall cinder block wall. So they never go back there, and it rains a couple times. I come back and turn on the server monitor, it makes a this LOUD screeching noise as it warms up. I quickly turn it off and run out of the room(wouldn't you?). I told my boss and he just says, "Oh, we left the window open over the weekend, some of the rain musta got on the monitor, it's ok right?" I just shook my head lol. So we got a broom, and went back, we poked the monitor power switch with the end of the broomstick from outside the door, then as it turned on we flipped and hid around the other side of the wall. As it warmed up the screeching quieted, then we noticed smoke comming up from the monitor, but we realized it was water vapor when it didn't smell like it. The
-Conrad
The only thing to try is to shoot it.
I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.
In the morning two things happened
1) Security Guard was arrested
2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.
Total downtime : ZERO.
A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
When my employer retired an old sun they gave it to me. I was very fond of the thing because I, when I was a student, learned Unix and programming on that beast. It was the workstation all the (geek-) students wanted to use.
Anyway, I got home with the thing and found out I didn't have the root-password for the OS. So, install a new OS: OpenBSD. To do that, you need to be able to tell the thing to boot from floppy. You do that using a little command at bootup. And you need.... a password to enter that mode.
great.
No-one on earth was left that could tell me about those passwords, so I googled around and found the sollution:
1. Startup the sun
2. Press STOP-A (or something) to get into the OpenPROM / OpenBOOt/Whatever menu
3. When it askes for the password RIP OUT THE PROMCHIP FROM THE MOTHERBORD
4. Enter blank password. The machine will try to validate it against its non-existing memory.
5. It will accept the blank password and you can do "ALTER PASSWORD"
6. INSERT THE PROMCHIP JUST BEFORE YOU ENTER THE NEW PASSWORD
7. Enter the new password
8. It stores it in the now replaced memory-chip.
9. Install OS. Have Fun.
It really amazed me that this just worked. But it did.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
(I onced shared this story with a popular computer magazine, and it got published)
Years ago, I went with a friend of mine to his boss's house to fix his computer. This guys' house wasn't a house, but a log cabin in a rustic town along a river with a winding one-lane road to get there. There was a general store and everything!
So we get there, and I sit down at this computer on a desk and start plugging away. Meanwhile, my friend gets a call from his wife. He starts pacing around, handling the various antiques and oddities one rarely sees except in a rustic environment like this.
When he picks up the revolver, his boss starts yelling "Put that down! Put that down!", but my friend was too distracted with his conversation to pay attention to the outside world. Sure enough, a loud *BANG* rang out. My friend dropped the phone and everyone checked themselves for holes.
After we were confidet we were all still alive, we noticed the HP LaserJet III printer sitting inches away from me on the desk had a hole in it. Wiping the sweat form my brow, I started laughing because the printer was still printing at the time! We later took some of the external housings off the printer and found some fragments, but the printers guts weren't damaged and it was printing fine.
(I wish HP's products were still that good)
The gun, of course, was real. My friend's boss sais he kept it on the end table to shoot the bats that inevitably found their way into his cabin. I think now he might stowe it when guests come over.
I used to work at a space company that produces the OBC (onboard computer) for the Ariane 5 (you can see where this is going already right?)
Well, I don't know if you remember (most Europeans probably do) but the first Ariane 5 blew up (due to software reasons) in spectacular style. The French foreign legion was tasked with finding any important bits in the swamps surround the launch site. Surely enough they found the OBC intact (it is built like a tank), eventually it got returned to the company I worked for, and whilst it didn't work entirely, it did return some diagnostic bits that *something* had gone terribly wrong. The original computer was sat in a cupboard by where I worked for a while, had a few dents in it but looked quite okay. if you are into these kinda things you can see a picture of it in this pdf hereBeat that for hardware abuse :)
Go google or check out Nortons site. There used to be *real* viruses, that would screw up your bios setting and send commands to your hard drive to write to blocks that didn't exist, causing your hard drive to beat itself to dead (stop hitting yourself! stop hitting yourself!...get it?). These are also pretty easy to block viruses if you have AV protection, but this was back in the early 90s, when most computers were never even online except maybe a BBS to dl some warez. (the source of the virii) So most didn't have any AV software installed or updated.
The fun virii were the ones that encrypted your hard drive, so if you booted off a floppy (write protected, of course) you could not read your hard drive to fix the problem. Without removal tools, these were pretty damn hard to fix, because they would be in memory, so they would rewrite the file if you deleted it. I haven't seen many virii lately that attempt to write to boot sectors, unless you count Windows as a virus.
99% of the viruses now are not viruses really, but worms or trojans, designed to deliver payloads of spam or replication. Annoying, but hardly destructive to hardware, and often easy to prevent the spreading of using the "properly configured firewall" we hear so much about on slashdot.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
My first PC was from them - it arrived with the floppy cable connected backwards, they insisted it had been thoroughly checked before despatch...
Years ago (the days of 486's) I had built myself a new PC and was in the process of installing Windows 95 when I had the thought that the PC might be overheating. Not wanting to stop the Win95 install (being as bitchin' as the PC was at the time it still took a whiel) I decided that I needed to allow for more ventilation. Instead of removeing the cover, popping open an empty drive bay or simply just using my head and NOT worrying about it, I decided to try and pop off a slot cover.
Well, instead of it coming off in my hands it fell partially into the case. So far so good but certainly not enough action for me. I decided top take a pair of needle-nose pliers and try and grab the slot cover and pull it out. I was doing good until I bumped the MoBo and "jzzzt" I lost my little game of "Operation."
I used that PC for another two years with only a blown serial port and one blown slot.
You wanna see abused PCs? Look inside my parents' PCs to see the 4 pounds of dust and ashes that have accumulated!
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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
I worked for my university's IS dept in college. We inherited a laptop that a teacher had abused. She set it on top of her car, forgot it was there, and started driving away. The screen was broken when it fell to the ground and was run over. The rest of the components seemed to work just fine. We made it one of our workstations -- just plugged up an external monitor. It later became the wireless router at my house. We named it roadkill.
I did the ultimate overcock hack to my old 386 16MHz. I auctually unsoldered the crystal oscillator from the motherboard and put in a socket so I could easily interchange oscillators for overclocking.
I managed to get it runing stably up to 25MHz w/o a heatsink (didn't need serious cooling back in the day). My max was 30Mhz, but that required a passive heatsink.
That's double clocks! I'd like to see someone do that with a modern processor! Too bad I never tried this till I had a P120, and my 386 was uber obselete.
That reminds me of the story of the Tiki 100 educational computer here in Norway - they were demoing it before the press, and to demo its ruggedness (and boy, was that clunk of metal rugged) they poured a half-liter of coke down into the keyboard. "It worked that day, and never again". :)
And the official service message after something had gotten into a Tandberg keyboard (those keyboards are heaven to type on, btw, beats the Model M) was "Set washing machine to low temperature, use no detergent."
toresbe
Sadly, not all USB is hot-swappable. We use NI-GPIB-USB cards here. If you try to unplug the card while it's running, you get the lovely smell of something burning as well as the knowledge that you've lost another $500 card... We learned pretty quickly, but we're still working on our clients. As for the person commenting on their computer being bulletproof, some of ours are. ^_^ Well, actually it's more the hardened cases on the laptops that are required to survive being driven over by a tank, but I suspect bullets may not do much more damage.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Many years ago I was working at a help desk for a major retailer. All of the terminals in our stores were IBM 3151's that weighed about 50 pounds and looked like a mailbox with an 8" screen on one end. At least once a day we'd get a call from a store to report a broken "lookup terminal". Our answer to this was to go unplug the thing, pick it up about 5" off the counter, then let go. This almost always worked. Why? The cards would work loose, and dropping the thing reseated them! The drop wouldn't hurt the rest of the thing because IBM seemingly made them to withstand a thermonuclear war back then. Ah, the good old days....
Ooh, do I have a good one for this thread!
:)
Back in the late '70s I was stationed on a guided missile destroyer (DDG class) in Pearl Harbor. I checked in just as the ship was preparing to go into the yards after a long Indian Ocean/WestPac deployment. She was overdue for a major overhaul by about 18 months. Since DDGs were supposed to be on 12 month maintenance cycle, you can imagine just how close to riding on the ragged edge a lot of the systems on board were.
Well, I was assigned to the electronic tech comm group (ETN) and told that I was taking over the UHF and HF radios from a guy who had left the ship about six weeks before I got on board. The ship had 4 HF transmitters, 2 100W and 2 1KW, 4 HF receivers, and a bank of 8 UHF transceivers. The UHF tranceivers were in pretty good shape, as there was still a guy assigned to them who had been doing most of the work. The HF receivers were sorta OK. The HF transmitters, OTOH, was a complete mess. I found to my (literal!) pain that mixing high powered electronics with an incompetent tech is a really, really bad idea.
Not knowing exactly where to start, I picked one of the 100W transmitters at random and dove in. I found 13 problems in 11 days. I should have known that I was in serious trouble when I closed it up to take it over to MOTU-9 (MObile Technical Unit number 9, a support facility full of senior techs), then couldn't get it re-opened when I got it on their bench. It turned out that the slide rails had been completely trashed somewhere along the line and the previous tech hadn't bothered to order replacements. Instead he had just let it sit partially open. After about 3 weeks I still didn't have it completely up to snuff. At least it would transmit on a portion of its designed frequency range.
The second 100W transmitter turned out to be in somewhat better shape. It would at least transmit across its assigned spectrum, but it had far more in the way of reflected power than it should have had. I finally figured out that he had damaged the antenna jack somehow. Considering that those things are almost impossible to put on wrong, I don't know how he managed it. In any case, after running so long with that much RF bouncing through the circuitry, the entire output amplifier was always iffy. I never did get it all the way back up to full strength.
The first 1KW amplifier was dead, dead, dead. That one turned out to be a simple fix, though. I just had to replace the last stage output tube and some burned out control circuitry from when the output tube had shorted across a couple of its plates.
The last 1KW amplifier was the worst. It had a habit of going from full strength power to off as the ship rolled, then back on again. When I pulled the power supply apart, I found that he had replaced all four diodes in the full wave rectifier. Not such a problem, except that most of the leads leading to the rectifier on the board had burned away when the rectifier burned up. Rather than lay down some new ones, he had simply threaded the leads of each diode through their holes, folded the legs down to touch the unburned part of the leads, AND HAD NOT BOTHERED TO SOLDER THEM DOWN!!!!
Every time the ship would roll, the diodes would shift enough to break contact, then reconnect. The truly amazing part is that he didn't start a fire in the comm shack from all the sparks in that power supply.
It says a lot about how well built that comm gear was built that even after all of that abuse, I was able to keep at least some HF transmitting capability up at all until we made into the yards. Granted, most of the time I was busier than a one armed paper hanger.
We went out 3 times before we went into the yards on training exercises. The exercises were in Hawaiian waters, and lasted 3 days, 3 days, and a week. I actually had 8 hours at the start of the week's cruise where I had every piece of hardware assigned to me up and operational at the same time. After two months straigh
The big iron z/OS (formally S/390) machines are supposed to be even beefier. They have the ability to virtualize a processor if one becomes damaged instantly.
Man, that's like some sort of bizarre, dark geek action flick. Perpetrator breaks in, beats geek with hammer (see his other posts for more details) and steals all his valuables.
The helpless geek can do nothing until his calculator is stolen, which is CROSSING THE LINE for a true nerd. Enraged and empowered by having a reason to fight, the geek fights back, killing the calculator-kidnapper, but in a horrible twist, discovers he has shot the very thing he was trying to save.
Fortunately, due to the heroic engineering efforts of TI, the calculator pulls through, leaving the geek and his arithmetical love to live happily ever after.
I am the head technician at a company that refurbishes computer equipment. I have seen everything you can imagine. My two personal favorites are:
A system was donated to us, but left outside our door all weekend. The induhvidual decided he didn't have to come during business hours. Anyway, it rained all weekend, and I mean it rained. Now this person was polite enough leave everything in a blue plastic recycling box for us (which happened to be in front of the door too) which happened to be below a major rain run off. This box nearly filled with water. We arrive to find a computer system fully submerged in icky rain water. Out of perverse interest we dumped out the water, and let it dry for a couple of days. The damn thing still worked, worked perfect actually. Even the floppy drive still worked.
The second story involves some of the more odd things we do around my shop when we're bored. The odd time we like to pick one system and do evil things to it. One day we decided it would be funny to wire together 3 power supplies in series and then connect them to 3 motherboards, also in series. God only knows why we did this, bordom I suppose. Regardless it smoked, wires melted, and flames came out of one of the supplies. All 3 boards had large scorch marks on them. Well I'll be damned if 2 of the 3 boards didn't still work. It was rather funny.
Back in 1973 I worked for T.I. as a calculator design engineer. The manager of the consumer division had a final test for new models that consisted of him throwing the prototype against the brick wall by his desk and allowing it to fall to the tile floor below. Dents and scratches were OK, but the case had to stay intact and the unit had to work. We made sure that we ran a similar test well before the prototype got in his hands.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Just about 2 years ago on the dot, I was in Calculus I when a massive thunderstorm broke. I remembered I left my window open...and I'd been doing work on my computer and it was sitting in front of said window. Well, I got back and it was kinda dry except for the one thing that stuck out the most from the mobo: the video card (an all in wonder 32mb pre-radeon edition *sniff*), which was totally drenched. Needless to say, it was displaying random snow and lines on my screen. I took it out, dried it off with a towel and tossed it on my bed. After letting it dry for a day or so, I decided to try it and lo and behold, it worked! Sorta. I picked up my ti4200 about a week later :)
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Once I bought an AS400 off ebay. The thing had to weigh like 800 lbs.
On attempt to move it into my basement, it tilted, smacked me in the head, knocked me to the bottom of the stairs and flew down after me.
Luckily one of the friends I had helping me was a REALLY BIG GUY, and he ended up catching the beast right before it landed on me. (he was bright red, with his back up against one of my house supports, but he stopped it)
Probably saved my life.
Anyhow, I never booted up the entire AS400. I really wanted it for parts. (hey I'm a geek, I like messing with things)
Everything I ever took out of that box worked just fine. (Hard Drives, fans, CPU boards I resold, etc).
Those things can take a serious beating.
Heard this one from a hardware tech I once took a class with, back in the day. My job at the time involved working with a high-end standalone rackmount graphics processor, so my company had me go to a class to learn how to maintain the hardware.
Anyway, the guy says that he got this call from a helicopter manufacturer who was using his product for a glass cockpit in their latest chopper model. It seems that under certain conditions the processor would do a hard reset, leaving the pilot without instruments. Since this was a prototype, the pilot had standard instrumentation as well as the digital on-screen ones, so there was no real danger, but still the company wanted to know why the device was failing.
To make a long story short, they ran every remote diagnostic they could without coming to a solution, so the company sent the tech to the chopper plant to have a look. The chopper guys took the guy out to the prototype, and the tech's jaw fell to the ground when he realized that the chopper guys had bolted the processor into a pod on the bottom of the helicopter - And this was a rackmount unit meant for a machine room - Not for the vibration or dust of a chopper on a runway!
After a couple of test flights they figure out the problem. Above a certain airspeed, the air pressure was high enough to physically push in the reset button on the back of the processor. After he got them to install a rackmount in the cockpit, all of their problems went away.
Yeah, I know it sounds like Snopes bait, but the guy seemed otherwise reliable, and swore it was a true story.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
oldSCO, this is.
Customer calls to tell me that their app server is kicking clients off occasionally. I drop into the office about ninety minutes later and ask where the machine is. They don't know. It turns out to be mounted vertically in a box under the front counter. The case has about 8mm clearance on top and about a mm each side, and when I go to haul it out (still running), I burn my fingers. The back of the box is closed.
Taking two notepads, I use one under and one over to wiggle the case (yes, still running) out far enough to get a screwdriver onto the case bolts, rest it on a stool, and unscrew the lid - letting the screws drop to the floor because they're too much too hot to touch.
When the lid comes off, assisted by the notepads, I get a blast of heat which literally frizzles my fringe and eyebrows. The machine stops kicking off users, and to my amazement nothing inside has actually melted. The PSU fan is dead, and the CPU fan is simply circulating the heat evenly throughout the box. This is a Pentium (last of the 486-style fans) running approximately 200Mhz.
I take a fan heater, set it to blow-not-heat and aim it into the case. Four hours later, at close of trade, I come back, shut the beastie down and replace the PSU. The machine then continues to operate for some months until they replace it.
Another customer running Linux called me out when their machine went all wonky midsummer. Both the PSU and CPU fans had been dead for some time, judging by the coatings. They'd added a new staff member, and the new desk had diverted the air from the airconditioner away from the box, else it'd probably still be working.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Back in the day, at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, we were working on a new hardware/software system called Project L. The astute readers here have heard me spout on about this project before, as it was years and years ahead of it's time. (Regrettably, funding issues forced it's early demise.)
... and the computation chugged along just fine, completing somewhat more slowly than it would have otherwise. These were not idle nodes, but rather ones intimately involved in the computation. While we, naturally, designed the system to be able to do this, it was actually pretty cool.
One of the goals of this project was to create an extensible, modular multiprocessor computer. The idea was that you would have some commodity hardware which was packaged in neat little blocks that you would snap together. Each neat little block would be more-or-less a fully functional unit, so if you had, say $1000 you could buy a 100-node machine, but if you had $2000, you could buy one twice as big, and hopefully, twice as powerful.
One of our demonstrations of the redundancy concepts involved to achieve this kind of extensibility was to have a four-node L machine running a reasonably long parallel process (realtime spectrographs). In the middle of one such computation, we physically removed half the nodes
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
And I didn't use anything as robust as wire. (-:
Links to two sets of pictures within.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
While moving a print shop around '90 or so I hit a bump and had a Macintosh II, (the very first one, PCXT looking thing, 680020), fall off the truck and cart wheel in a 35 mph shower of parts.
Top case half got run over by a car before I picked up bottom and salvaged the mother board and power supply from it, nailed to an old computer table it works great still to this day affectionately known as, "Mackenstein".
Someone in the USA had a PDP-11 and a Fujitsu Eagle disk drive sink under muddy water during a flood (the water eventually covered the rack and came to just below the ceiling). The machine continued to operate until the power failed, after the flood peaked. Underwater. Under muddy water.
When the flood subsided, they needed the computer back up in a hurry so they hosed it out, dried it off, replaced the air filter in the hard disk and tried powering it up again. It worked. The tape drive (Cipher F880, I think) didn't survive, the rest did.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Once my apartment caught fire. My bedroom was completely destroyed. All that was recognizable were the springs from the matress. In my living room, everything was black and burnt. My monitor was black and soaked wet by the firemen.
The monitor case had melted over the tube. When i got the monitor to a new place, i gave it a try. It worked. It still does today.
Since then, all my monitors have been samsung.
I was working for a computer manufacturer back in the mid '90s, and for a really shitty salary. If we made _one_ mistake during one month, we would loose NOK 2000 ($285!) from the pay. I was usually sitting with the case on my lap, leaning up against the desk at about an 45 degrees angle. I had just mounted the mainboard when I felt my lap getting wet. Wondering wtf was going on, I checked. It turned out to be blood, I'd been bleeding down the backside of the mainboard, dripping in my lap (damn cheap compo cases, they'll cut you up just looking at'em!). So I unscrewed the MB, took it to the toilet, and washed it of under the tap. wiped it mostly clean with some toiletpaper, and took it back to production. Screwed it in an turned it on. It worked. So I shipped it =)
I dropped a PSU into a compo case, and managed to break the mobo in half. Looking at the MB, turned out only one chip had loosened completely, and none was broken. Soldered all the broken wires, believe me when I say that that is a shitty job! It looked crazy, but worked.
Lost a screw down on the motherboard, and heard a pop, and saw som white smoke. The screen went blank. To get the screw out, I lifted the case and turned it over. Another pop, and more smoke. I actually forgot to turn of the power befor I turned the machine around. I blew a capacitor on the mobo, and one of the chips on my NIC. Mobo worked, the coax part of my combo NIC didn't (AUX and TP worked though).
Spillt a cup of coffee in my IBM keyboard, but continued to use until half of the keys got stuck as the coffee dried. washed it under the tap, let it dry for a couple of hours, and it worked again (still does, 8 years later).
Had a heatsink on the CPU that came loose, and fell down on the graphics card. The screen went blank, the machine rebooted, and the still blank. Probably would have gotten a POST beep error, but I had removed the PC speaker to fix a broken radio. Moved the graphics card one PCI slot down, reseated the heatsink, and turned it on. It worked.
We had a testmachine when I worked doing techsupport. That machine took some beating. It had been dropped several times. We had hotswapped just about everything several times. Any new card we would try, we hotswapped with one of the current ones. And since the carpeted floors on dry days would build up a helluvalot of static, we had zapped it unnumerable times. After some time, the both the HDDs started to show wear and tear. We just mapped around all the badsectors and continued to use it. A truly marvelous machine.
I had read somewhere that, if programmed directly and incorrectly via assembly code, one could well and truly hose the adaptor. Being a curious little monkey, and not a little bit mischievous, I decided to see if it was true. I sent the mysterious instructions to the Hercules card, and nothing happend, at first. Then I started to smell something burning, something very stinky and plastic-like. Suddenly I noticed small wisps of smoke rising from the back of the computer. I had indeed fried my employer's graphics adaptor! Too cool.
Once upon a time back in the day circa 1985/86 I was using an Atari800XL, that had been modified from 64K to 128K with a toggle switch for compatabilty, to control an experiment on molecular regeneration.
Basicly there were two box like devices. You put a sample in the first box flipped a switch and the sample disapeared from the first box and was recombined in the second box.
We'll one Saturday night something very strange happened. Just as I was replacing the Plutonium core, lightning struck outside and fried the whole experiment. The next thing I knew I was in a different world with powerful strength that I didn't know I had. We'll needless to say when I finally woke up, I found the experiment totally vanished along with the Plutonium, but ther was my Atari.
I turned it on and guess what, it WORKED! It still works unto this day.
I think I've told this story before but it's a good one so I'll tell it again.
While in high school I worked at a small sub shop that was just big enough to have one arcade game. It sat right across from our main counter and so during our down time and after work we would often play them. This being during the 80's these were oldschool scroller type games that you can play on a phone now a days but at the time they were teh bomb.
One day one of us figured out that if they kicked the panal where the coins went it they would get a credit! This was then made into a science by using a stool to hit the exact "sweet spot" on the machine to rack up tons of credits. Mind you this was done mostly during after hours so the game still would make some money during the daytime but the effects of such a treatment was none the less noticable. When the owners of the games would come back and see the machine we would always attribute the damage to "some damn kids!" (Truthful in a sence.)
Having crossed the line such that we no longer respected these machines we got more ambitious and would open up the cabinets after hours when beating them to get credits wasn't working. We still beat them up of course just to make sure that our story would not seem out of place.
Finally one day we got a gawd awful game. I don't remember what it was but we all decided that we hated it. We knew better than to try and display too much intrest in it to our bosses as they would then tell us that we should be working yada yada and also knew that it was not going to be due to cycle out for a while so unless something "happened" to it we were going to be stuck with it. (A machine had previously burnt on it's own accord before and it had been promptly replaced with a diffrent one so...)
Various methods of disableing the machine was discussed. I, being the geek of the bunch, was consulted and after some debate I said that it had to look natural or we would be picked as the prime suspects. Now after reading the many storys involving soda related mishaps I am duefully impressed at some of the recovery storys. However most of these storys involve quick actions with drying and cleaning. We had no such intentions.
Fully 3 large fountain Cokes were poured into the top of the cabinet before it finally sputtered and died. The fact that it took 3 was impressive no matter how you slice it. After number 2 I was actually, I was doing the pouring mind you, getting nervous that it would blow up on me before it just died. But finally after number 3 it clicked a few times and then would not come back on.
Even with it's seemingly "natural" death it took some fast talking to explain how the Coke did get into the case seeing as how it had mostly sloped top. Once again those "damn kids" with their sodas were to blame.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I have an Apple PowerBook G3 Pismo which was dropped 300 feet from a helicopter on Antarctica in January of 2001. Despite a cracked screen it has functioned flawlessly as a small server for three years now.
Once my mother decided to hang my jacket out on the balcony. In winter. I forgot to pull out my palm first, and only realised it when I wanted to use it. Damn it was cold. And even in the next morning, after having it recharged in the craddle, it still had a reaction time of about 30secs.
Look at the picture - it's an old console TV, built in the pre "lawsuit prevention" school of industrial design. It probably had half assed clips on particleboard, not tamper resistant torx.
You know - Darwinist design theory.
I think my son is going down that route. I have a jeweller's screwdriver with different shafts stored in the handle. R3.0 wanted to take something apart, but I had to step away for a few minutes, so "Don't mess with the screwdriver!"
I come back 15 minutes later, and his toy is pieces. He took the screwdriver, selected the correct bit (#0 phillips), mounted it in the handle, dismantled said toy, and then dissasembled the screwdriver and put the bit back. I was torn between praising his ingenuity or punishing his disobedience.
He was 3 years old at the time.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Fellow I know used to work on Navy ships for Raytheon, building and using ROVs (the little remote control submarines). Some moron accidentally dropped a Compaq laptop full of highly classified information off a ship in the North Atlantic, somewhere around 1,500 meters deep. They found the thing, dried it off, and it booted right up. Worked for a utility district for a while. Salesman came around with "ruggedized" laptops. He said, "Let me borrow one of your boom trucks." OK. He went about 45 feet up in the bucket, dropped the laptop, and after a couple of bounces it booted up. Then he closed the case again, ran over it with the truck, opened it up, and the damn thing still worked. They bought 25 of the things.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
One morning a few years back my brother smelled burning electronics in his bedroom while there were six computers in there. When he went to shut down a (Linux) server we were going to co-locate that morning he couldn't bring up the display, so he had to remotely log into it. It ran a bit on the herky jerky side, but he did manage a graceful shutdown.
When I got on the scene I saw chunks of ceramic material laying on the bottom of the case. It turned out that the cheep Trident card we had in that thing, which was sitting on the PCI base with everything else, gone through a cascading short circuit with solder joints melting and oosing across the board. After there was enough shorts and exploded capacitors on the video card, the main IC got so hot that it exploded. Surprising enough even with an exploded video card and a burnt trace going into the motherboard and the PCI bus mostly jacked, the system kept going!
I used to work as a sysadmin for a large oil company managing their datacenter in Alaska. This was back in the 80's so we are talking big iron. IBM 3090's, 4381's, VaxCluster with 8600's, 785's, and a about a 2,000 square foot disk farm. I was out fishing, (it being a weekend and all) when I got a 911 page. The ENTIRE datacenter had crashed, every single server with the exception of a an ancient Vax750 sitting all alone in the corner. Following a panicked drive back to the datacenter, I was joined by the several of the Operations team when we discovered that the tape librarian had hooked up a degauser to about a 300ft extension cord and was walking around flirting with a janitor while she degaussed tapes on any available surface, mostly the disk farm........
Back in high school local companies would donate their old - read: scrap - mainframes to our electronics lab. The computers weren't functional, but we salvaged as many components as we could. Rather than painstakingly de-soldering chips from the PCBs, we'd take a blow torch to the back of boards, shake them and let the chips fall to the floor. The TTL logic chips always survived this brute force approach. With CMOS chips, it was 50/50. Our brain cells likely faired much worse, given that we ended up breathing toxic fumes from the burning boards. Of course, some would say we didn't have that many to begin with considering our choice of chip removal technique.
About 13 years ago, I had a TI-81 calculator which I loved. One day I put it in my bag to take to school, along with some honey that I was going to have for lunch. The top of the honey came off and the calculator soaked in it until it became completely permeated by honey. I could see honey inside the screen. The calculator no longer worked at this point.
So I took the calculator home, filled the sink with water, and swished the calculator around in the water for about ten minutes until I couldn't see honey inside the screen anymore.
Then I let it dry out. A day went by and it still wasn't working. Then another day, still dead.
After about three days the inside of the screen had cleared to the point where it only had some condensed moisture around the edges. At this point it not only turned on on, but to my delight I discovered that it still had all the programs that I had laboriously typed in over the past few months.
My first do-it-yourself computer has suffered some. The motherboard is an Abit KT7 with an AMD Athlon Thunderbird at 800 MHz. The HSF that I had for it was the kind that requires a flat-head screw driver to hold the clips down while you install it. While attempting to install the HSF, the screw driver slipped to the side and the blade drove right into the motherboard, knocking off a diode or two right next to the CPU. I had a sick feeling in my gut at having just killed my expensive motherboard (expensive to a highschooler at least), but I decided to carefully try again. After slowly but successfully seating the HSF onto its mounting bracket, I power it on to see if I was lucky enough to not kill it. Aparently it was my lucky day. It POSTed and works fine to this day, some many years later. At the moment, it's sitting in my parents' kitchen powering Mom's computer. It never generates errors and is rock-solid (indefinite uptime, in excess of a month though), so either the motherboard is increadibly fault-tolerant, or those pieces I knocked off aren't used for anything that the machine does or has ever done.
In High School, way back when PC-AT's were the norm, a fellow classmate accidentally "stored" his class assignment floppy (5 1/4") in the back of one of those old DOS 2.1 "folder boxes". When he found it a day or so later, it was creased in half along the read window on the disc and the casing had been split in multipla places.
Not wanting to give up on a semester's worth of programming work, we unfolded it, placed it under a websters unabridged dictionary for a weekend to flatten out the crease and sure enough, it worked just fine...not a single bad sector.
A couple years back a watermain opened up and blew a 2ft hole in the wall of our computer room. During the next few hours several million gallons of water entered the building through the main server room. The force of the water blew the mounting bolts for the telco racks out of the floor and moved them about 10 feet where they ran into the SAN cabinets. The power didn't go out until the UPS batteries shorted out. Over the next three weeks we recovered the data from about 500 36GB hard drives that populated the SAN. Only 3 of them needed new electronics and only 4 disks were unrecoverable.
I used to work as a tech in a secondary school (college I guess)..
Teacher comes to me complaining she can't read her 3&1/4" disk.
Not a problem, I grab it off her to see what I can do.
Problem. It's stapled... 3 times.
Enter the twilight zone.
I look at her a little bit sideways.. "What happened?"
"I spilt coffee on it."
"Uhuh.."
"Well, I cleaned it."
This just got CRAAZY.
"Cleaned it?"
"Well, I opened it up and washed it with dishwashing fluid and put it back together. They don't make them well, I had to staple it!"
"Uh." "Uh." "Uh.. Let me see what I can do with it, I'll... Uh.. Leave a message for you in your pigeon hole.."
"Thanks!"
I was tempted to just throw it and say I couldn't get anything.. But, I'm a nice guy. In the drive it goes.
MY GOD. It's reading in the drive...
Using a combination of xcopy, copy, "type blah.doc >c:\1.txt" I was able to retrieve 13 of the 14 files.
Sooo. I copied them to another disk and gave it back.. She was dissapointed about not getting all of her files back..
I then walked back to my office "HEY BOSS, you're not going to believe this.."
Oh, she was also miffed that I wouldn't give back her disk. She liked the green ones and disliked the black ones...