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Is the Game Boy the Toughest Product Ever Made?
An anonymous reader writes "CNET is running an article about tough technology, which aptly includes the Nintendo Game Boy, a device so tough that mine still works after many years. 'There's no two ways about it: the original Game Boy is one of the hardest gadgets ever conceived. Rumor has it this beige behemoth isn't made of plastic, but from the skulls of fallen Gurkhas. If you ever saw one that was broken, it's because it lost a boxing match with a nuclear bomb — on points.' So do you agree that the Game Boy is the toughest consumer electronics device ever made?"
Back in the stone age when you didn't own your phone, but just leased it from the phone company, those things were darn near indestructible.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
http://www.aqualion.com/blog/uploaded_images/football-777893.jpg
I've had this for over 25 years. Still works.
I remember my brother dropped his Gameboy in a lake accidentally when he was younger. It was under water for a week until friends of ours with scuba gear found it.
That damn thing worked after we dried it out for a couple days and popped fresh batteries in it. It was missing a couple lines on the display, but it worked.
Granted, it was fresh water, but still.
I remember reading a blurb in an issue of Nintendo Power (I want to say sometime in the early 90's) that featured a picture of a Game Boy that had supposedly been in a house fire. They were able to fit the Tetris cartridge back into the slot, turn the game on, and actually play it (albeit, with some loss in the pixels) even though the shell of the system was almost completely charred.
I think that's pretty hardcore.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
A bit lightly toasted. The page has a link to a YouTube video on it as well.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I got my first gameboy when I was about 8 years old when I was going on a flight by myself to see my mom in FL. That one lasted me probably about 8 months. I remember the first time I broke it, I dropped it down the front steps at my gramma's house. The device stayed intact, but the screen wouldn't display anything except for a couple of horizontal black lines.
I got a new unit a couple months later from my dad which lasted me close to a year before it finally wouldn't turn on one day. We tried replacing the batteries, but nothing would fix it. I remember seeing my dad with it open on his desk doing some kind of surgery to it. He wound up taking the screen out of that one and transplanting it into my first one, thereby fixing it (I had to do a similar thing with my PSP, but that's another story). That gameboy still works to this day, although I made the mistake of putting the majority of my gameboy and gamegear games into the same drawer as this 8" speaker magnet that I had and none of them work anymore.
I've got really bad luck with electronics... Not including the normal upgrade process, only replacements for faulty units, I've had about 6 ipods, more than 10 cell phones, 3 palm pilots, 2 PSPs, 3 xbox360s, 2 Wiis, about 6 Laptops, a dozen monitors (CRT), countless harddrives (well over 20), and several new headphones, keyboards, mice, digital cameras, drive enclosures and powerbricks. Many were replaced under warranty, but still.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
What's the last Microsoft project that Bill Gates spent considerable time writing code for before his managerial duties took away his time for coding?
:)
The portable, handheld battery-operated TRS-80.
Solid as a rock. There are tales of people skipping them across concrete and they still work.
And as far as the code? Bill must have done something right, because as of a few years ago (I last heard this in 2005 or 2004) there are still some of these beasts in use. Not much computing power, but they have an RS-232 port. The O/S is flexible enough that there are corporations using the device still. Apparently, the thing is so tough that there are off-shore oil platforms running some ancient equipment that dumps data through an RS-232 port, and the crews that have to service them use the portable TRS-80's to grab the data and take it back to their offices where they upload it to their PC's. More modern equipment apparently chokes after constant exposure to salt air, constant shock, and, well, oil workers. They're tough guys, you know.
The original Blackberries, the Mobitex 850s, were bricks. Back at RIM we used to drop-kick them across the office for testing.
I'd vote for this as one of the toughest ever made. One time I got home late at night and somehow left the phone on the roof of the car. Overnight, it snowed about five inches. I didn't feel like shoveling the driveway, so I just got in, gunned the engine and after a few back-and-forth runs, made it out onto the road. Got to work, couldn't find the phone. Finally, after I got home again, I took my cordless house phone outside and dialed the Nokia. Underneath the packed snow, under the car, there was a green glow and a faint ring. I dug the Nokia out, wiped it off, and it still worked. Sure, the stubby antenna had broken (easily replaced) but the screen wasn't cracked and it could still make calls. I still have that phone in a drawer somewhere and in the battery on the back there are still deep grooves from the grit on the tires rubbing through the plastic.
What really got me was that I figured I had driven over the thing about eight times.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Mine still works. I bought it in '90, just before heading over for Desert Shield/Storm. I was on the ground the whole time and it worked fine, even with all the dust and grit. I left some regular batteries in it, around '98 and had to clean up the mess a couple years ago but after that, is still working ok. Had to get it working so I could introduce my daughter to it. After 6 months, she was bugging me for a DS.
I drank what? -- Socrates