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Long-Term PC Preservation Project?
failcomm writes "I've been talking with my son's (middle-school) computer lab teacher about a 'time capsule' project. The school has a number of 'retirement age' PCs (5-6 years old — Dells, HPs, a couple of Compaqs), and we've been kicking around the idea of trying to preserve a working system and some media (CDs and/or DVDs), and locking them away to be preserved for some period of time (say 50 years); to be opened by students of the future. The goal would be to have instructions on how to unpack the system, plug it into the wall (we'll assume everyone is still using 110v US outlets), and get the system to boot. Also provide instructions on how to load the media and see it in action; whether it is photos or video or games or even student programs — whatever. So first, is this idea crazy? Second, how would we go about packing/preserving various components? Lastly, any suggestions on how to store it long term? (Remember, this is a school project, so we can't exactly just 'freeze it in carbonite'; practical advice would be appreciated.)"
The problem I see with this is that you'd basically need to include instructions on how to operate every protocol as well as an independent power source to operate it.
The best bet would just be to include a laptop and a few solar chargers to power it. If the future world can't power a laptop with light for some reason... they don't deserve to look back into the past.
Perhaps that mineral oil which is used to keep CRAYs cool might work? Maybe just get a barrel of that, drop all of the components in, and seal it up.
I'm not sure how practical it will be for when it's opened, but it'll suffice for keeping the sucker preserved.
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"US Power" is not a defined term. Even if you went to the effort of saying "The two leads need to be supplied with a sine-wave alternating current peaking at 115 Volts" you have no way of knowing that in 50 years they'll be using Volts, AC, two leads, or know what a sine-wave is. I like the previous poster's suggestion of a laptop with a solar charger. Of course this makes an assumption that there will be sunlight in the right frequencies and not the bad evil sunshine frequencies. Who knows what 50 years of industrial evolution, weather changes, and clouds will bring. Heck, what if they try and start it up in Seattle and all they have is clouds? Finally, EVEN IF they did start it up, the point of a time capsule is to provide a glimpse of the past, not to ANNOY AND IRRITATE THE FUTURE. That means whatever OS you install on there is a waste. Making someone go through the tedious boot-up sequence (50 years, Moore's Law, remember?) is a waste. In short, a waste. Much better to give them code samples of your hello_world.c so they can laugh about how stuff was hard in the past. Regards E P.S. FTG!
In 50 years battery acid damage and bad caps may stop the systems from even booting. Bit rot may mess up the bios code as well.
It got damaged in a flood. Even if it hadn't it wouldn't matter. We just use this 20 year old time machine invented in 2039 to come back for our retro-gaming fix. It's a clunker compared to the new time machines, but it was cheap. Actually, probably cheaper than your P4 uses... AND it uses less power.
We actually save power by going back in time and using the past's power anyway. The future is AWESOME. Come join us soon!
NO electronics are designed to last 50 years. If you got basically all the moisture out of the storage facility, everything but the storage devices MIGHT last, IF the temperature were stable enough. And at the end, you'd have a hermetically sealed container full of poison because odds are that the nasty crap would have come out of some of the capacitors anyway, and the plastic would have been offgassing all of this time, and your time capsule would probably be declared a superfund site.
Moral of the story: shoot some digital video of some people using the computers, then pack them off to the recyclers. Whether the exercise is worthy is not really at issue; it's not really a feasible idea anyway. The cost of preserving the machines (are you going to have shielding capable of protecting digital magnetic media over that time scale?) coupled with the risk of the systems not working when you try to fire them up anyway makes the whole point moot for most schools (and most anyone else, too.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you're missing the point of the project. There's far more to computing than operating system and software. If the point was to show where virtualization was now to people 50 years ago, your idea is great, but the point is to remind people 50 years from now what kinds of computers we had that the average person used.
How uncool would everything be if you opened up a time capsule from the 80s and found out that it consisted of a polaroid picture of everything people wanted to put into the time capsule?
No consumer electronics are designed to last 50 years. Unless you have been computing on a space probe, recycle the computers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1. The students won't care. They'll be concerned with whatever popular culture dominates in 2059, not with old tech. Except for the nerds.
2. If you do this, preserve other things as well. Preserve a copy of the newspaper from the Obama inauguration. (Provide instructions on how to open and read a paper newspaper.) Preserve whatever popular culture dominates in 2009. Preserve pictures of the school and letters from the students.
3. Think carefully about whether you'd really like to inflict Windows XP and Compaq hardware on a new generation of students.
4. Store it someplace dry. Moisture is your biggest enemy. Basements will flood, roofs will leak. Think mold, think corrosion.
5. Motherboard batteries will die, and may leak. Remove them and all other batteries. Forget laptops.
The information in flash memory is stored as electric charge which slowly dissipates. Last time I checked, it was recommended to refresh it periodically, or the information could be lost in as little as 10 years.
This is true. But, I would hope that unpacking an actual system that is authentic and plugging in the components would be quite an experience. But for all I know, 6-7th graders will be bored out of their skull. Invite their parents along to open it. I bet it'll be the big kids that really dig it.
Keep multiple systems and monitors.
In 50yrs I think you'd have more problem porting the video out than anything else. Remove the batteries too.
Why not store 3 complete systems in 3 entirely different ways. Hoping that one of them will survive intact. Or components from all three will have enough intact to make a complete system. Let's assume that whoever finds it, even in a century will be intelligent enough to turn it on. Unless this ends up being an Old Man in the Cave sort of scenario. Then you've no hope anyway.
My uncle still fires up his Apple LISA every few months to do his accounting on it.
Instead of 50 years, make it 25 or 20. Then their kids can be in middle school and see the computer their folks used to use.
There are plenty of pc's made in 1984 that can still work fine.
Archival DVD rated at 300 years. It might not last 300 years, but hopefully it'd last long enough for this time capsule.
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home_Office/Storage/U9P4F7L2
Definitely don't use recordable media that are dye-based or phase-change. If you can get the CDs or DVDs pressed professionally, do it - music CDs are made from durable polycarbonate with a layer of silvering applied on the top side, then covered over with lacquer or, preferably, another layer of polycarbonate.
Wrap the discs in paper, then vacuum-seal them in shrink wrap. Seal them in a padded sealed tyvec envelope. Label "Do not open until Christmas 2060" with a Sharpie.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
In my experience, departments can be re-structured, staff get replaced, budgets get changed, buildings get remodelled, torn down, or re-purposed. Frankly, if you expect such a project to survive even 50 years you may have to do a bit of planning first. Figure out who is going to manage the whole thing; a system can't just be put in a closet in a classroom; find a central location (say, a large airtight, waterproof safe in the school library, labelled with a plaque, and get the school board, school paper, etc. informed about the project so that its existence is recorded in various ways. I'm sure that's just about the best you could do with your budget. I'd also not recommend preserving just one system, but probably several complete ones, maybe of varying age. If you got a couple of 286's with PC-DOS, a couple of Pentium II's with Windows 95, a couple of original iMacs with Mac OS 9, etc, that might be much more interesting than just one system, and surely it's better to have some redundancy in case one or more of the machines don't survive for some reason. And certainly include as much physical media with as wide of a variety of software as you can...floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, zip disks, and perhaps best of all would be USB flash drives as these would be more likely to survive than optical or magnetic media, and unlike these, USB mass storage might be possible to read with computers with computers built in 2020 or even later. Miscellaneous tips: I wouldn't bother with any software that requires online activation, active internet connection, etc. I'm sure the internet will be quite different from how it is today, and even software giants like Adobe or Microsoft may be long forgotten in 2060. Make sure the systems POST without their clock batteries; these will surely be dead in 2060. Include as much paper documentation as you can. Manuals, quickstart guides, printed tutorials, anything. The documentation on this stuff might be very well preserved online in 2060. Or it might not.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
For long time storage, I would suggest taking apart the entire system and giving it a good cleaning to remove any dust, Also inspect all electrolytic capacitors for any leakage or damage, you don't want an out-of-box experience to have to include replacing all the capacitors (although it may end up needing it anyway) This will obviously include voiding the warranty on the power supply to clean it out properly (be careful of the capacitors inside as they could hold a deadly charge, even after 15 minutes if the internal resistors don't work correctly) and inspect it. You should remove things like the CMOS battery, usually a button lithium cr2032, which would leak and destroy circuits on the motherboard, or at least go dead, and you should also pack some spare parts and components with it (at least a spare motherboard, ram, cpu, power supply, optical drive, spare fans, expansion cards, etc) , along with the documentation for them, which might not be available then. Pack at least 2 hard drives, pre-loaded with all the software you want them to see, including iso's of the discs that you will include, as you don't know how long the cdrom/dvd media will actually last.. you might want to include a fully bootable flash drive or two with the software and os as well. Include a complete listing of the bios settings for when they do have to put a battery in... if you can, make a written writing with all the electrolytic capacitors values and voltages, as that might come in handy for later. Include as many operating systems as is possible, to give a flavor of what pc's used to be like and what used to run on them, make sure all the licensing information is both in paper and digital form for any piece of commercial software, as they may need it to run the software, even if the companies who made it are long out of business by then. if the pc uses a standard db15 for vga, you should leave a crt and a lcd if possible, and if it uses a dvi connection you should also leave a DVI-DB15 adapter. Make as many video output options as you can available in case things have changed....
Include a nice strong keyboard (like an old IBM Model M) along with a couple of the other keyboards you have (use different models and brands if possible), as the rubber membrane keyboards will likely not age very well. Include a ball and a optical mouse for snickers, and possibly a document on how each works...
Of my years of collecting old pc's, that's what I've always wished was done for me! =)
a few extra motherboards, most necessarily
it won't get you to 100 years, but assuming you pack away 4, and 2 die in the first 30 years, it will get you past 50 years at least
and, with hard work, and assuming nonoverlap in what part failed, you could cannibale parts to get at least one still working for a very long time
besides, even if they completely stop making capacitors, past 150 years, and all the caps fail, a capacitor isn't exactly a difficult component to troubleshoot, understand, or even make
at 150 years, there would be enough interest in building a new capacitor, and enough interest form antique historians to invest in the time to understand and trouble shoot the pc to keep the thing running
and at 200 years, it would probably even be worth a pretty penny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wait 50 years, unpack it and plug it in.... Then wait while it downloads 50 years worth of windows updates as it simultaneously gets infected with 50 years worth of viruses, worms and other nasties!
Slip in a paper share of MSFT in the time capsule with a note : can you imagine that in OUR time, people would pay seventeen BUCKS for that !!?
Most of the EEPROMs used to store the BIOS code only have a rated data retention lifespan of 10 or 20 years. In 50 years, it would likely not even be able to boot.
But even should your EEPROM remain intact, the other problem is getting that hard drive spindle which has remained stationary for 50 years spinning again.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
After glancing at many of the nay-sayers and upon this posting, I'd like to remind everyone that very few common instruments of man have been created to endure beyond the life of their users, and quite often they are a joy to be discovered, even if the most basic of happenstances occurs to keep them somewhat preserved.
Many solid state electronics last just fine for decades, nestled in their Styrofoam enclosures. I have personally seen a 1981 KayComp power up after being stashed under a desk for 25 years. I have little doubt it could have happily lasted another 25 down there. . . mercury and plastics gassing away.
The important thing is to offer reasonable protection and documentation. Your Media is going to be the first thing to go. . . so try and document how the media would have worked "IF" it works. Use Acid Free Mylar where possible to keep paper and media from reacting as much with the environment. Take reasonable steps to make sure the computers are packed away from light, (UV hasten the decomposition of plastics), dirt and moisture. Make sure they can be accessed without being damaged and create a reasonable storage scheme that is organized, minimal and well documented.
Essentially, do your best. Even if they don't power up in 50 years because they won't accept the wireless transmission of neo-voltage power used in that day and age, they will be marvels to students of that day. And people may figure out new pieces to apply to their lives in the future based on where we were going today. Also, if one "teacher" or child who has yet to be born, wants it bad enough, they'll figure out how to make them work, or have enough data from the specimens you try to preserve to make a model in their modern day.
Afterall, if I could see just pieces of something like Babbage's difference engine, it's a wonderful experience, even if it doesn't have any punch cards to fully work.
good luck
-Scribe of Argos
The electrolytic capacitors are going to dry out in 50 years and will cease to function. There's a chance they will damage other components when the power supply is powered up again. I've seen it happen with equipment that is less than 25 years old. I don't think there is any known solution to this problem.
I'm currently restoring a 50 year old stereo receiver (Harmon Kardon TA230) and the electrolytics are almost completely gone. Everything else is in excellent shape; the resistors, coils, tubes, even the lamps test good but the caps are all shot. This receiver has a old style transformer power supply, so I can bring the voltage up slowly using a Variac for testing. Your computers are going to have switching power supplies which will not like having a lower voltages applied to them so that's not an option.
I honestly have my doubts that much from this era will survive 50 years. It's all made as quickly and as cheaply as possible with the expectation that it will be replaced in 3 or 4 years.
I currently have an Apple ][ that no longer can read its boot disks, a PC XT that doesn't always recognize one of its ST-506 drives and a few months ago I went through my Amiga disks and found that most of them were no longer readable. All of these are far less than 50 years old and have been stored carefully and well cared for.
However, my AIM-65 made in 1977 is still able to read data from my ASR 33's paper tape reader, which is 45 years old and still working fine.
Yeah, my wife hates me for keeping all this junk.
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The US National Archives for Preservation and Archives Professionals page contains much information, including that which is specific to time capsules.
Northeast Document Conservation Center is another good resource with guidance pertaining to specific types of materials.
NIST's PDF guide Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs contains best-practices for optical media storage/handling.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
That would make it a serious pain in the ass to do time calculations.
The students of the future will figure out the rest no matter how the education system will have been rotten.
I couldn't care less about the computers from 10 years ago, let alone any monsters from the dawn of computing.
You may have fond memories of today's technology (probably because you have an irrational attachment after seeing your son grow up with it) - but I have absolutely no expectation that kids in 50 years will care about today's computers.
Assuming your preservation works, this is the reaction that I would expect:
1. Anger at being forced to play with this outdated stuff for a class project.
2. Laughter at how incredibly bad the hardware is, how impossibly dated the software is.
3. How difficult all this crap is going to be to recycle.
If you want to preserve a computer - do it for yourself. Not for some unborn future kids that are, in all likelihood, not going to even have a passing interest in the technology that's been enjoyed by your present-day kid.
Print out a copy of all the slashdot suggestions and include it. In 50 years they might have an idea of who was *Insightful* or *Full of it*.
This is true. But, I would hope that unpacking an actual system that is authentic and plugging in the components would be quite an experience. But for all I know, 6-7th graders will be bored out of their skull. Invite their parents along to open it. I bet it'll be the big kids that really dig it.
I dunno. Would there be any point in a 2009 PC without a 2009 internet to use it with?
There is no way you will be able to just toss a computer in a sealed capsule for half a century and expect it to work when unsealed and powered. Modern components simply are not engineered to this level of reliability, and for good reason - they're going to be obsolete in 5 years, so it makes no economic sense. You'll have to do at a lot of detail work to try and assure that the machine will even start:
You will have to replace every single electrolytic capacitor (in everything - mainboard, PSU, every drive, monitor, mouse, keyboard and speaker amp) with solid-state versions. Electrolytics dry out and it's very unlikely that anyone other than a computer historian would think of this before powering the computer up. Altair 8800s and Imsai 8080s from the late 1970s are now to the point that their power supplies and electrolytics must be replaced for them to work reliably - don't expect your machine to fare any better.
It's also a safe assumption that the lubrication in any rotating media drive will be gone by 2060 - not sure how to deal with that other than providing lube in a hermetically sealed package along with instructions to disassemble the CD drive and apply it.
How are you going to have your data last? Tapes and hard drives will demagnetize by 2060. Flash may have a prayer; Your best bet is to get some extremely long-lasting batteries and interface a microcontroller with a plugged-in thumb drive. Store the data along with error-correction codes on the drive. Have the system wake up every ten or twenty years and "scrub" the drive, reading every block and writing it back. Do the same with the system's bios EEPROM - the system will be useless if that gets killed by a cosmic ray. You should also pay to have data CDs gold-mastered - redundancy is the only way to go here.
The display is another problem. The only technology I'd really trust to just work without needing any repair is an LED display; LEDs can run continuously for decades. After the LEDs, a CRT is probably the best bet (despite a decent one having hundreds of precision electrolytics that'll need replacing) - After all, we've got examples of working CRTs from the 50s and 60s. Newer technologies haven't been around long enough to prove themselves yet.
Get a corrosion resistant, hermetically sealed package for the whole kit and kaboodle and flood it with a dense inert gas like SF6 to keep anything from growing. Thoroughly sterilize every square millimeter with a hard UV light just to be safe. Put the HDD in its own sealed bag full of nitrogen if you include one.
For power, your best bet is probably a primary battery (Mg-Cu) with seperately-stored electrolyte feeding an inverter - The shelf-life is "forever until mixed," at which point the machine will probably have a few hours of power depending on how much you include.
Assume that the people who recover the device will still speak your local language and have libraries where they can look up terms such as volt/byte/etc. If they can't, I doubt there will be enough of civilization left to care about some artifact from before The Fall. I think that it will take far more time and money than you're prepared to casually expend if you want to entomb a computer and have any reasonable probability of it turning on and actually working after 5 decades alone, rather than just popping a PSU capacitor or being a dead relic.
Don't hard drives decay quickly if unused?
Also, you might want a cracked version of windows, Microsoft probably won't have the activation servers running in 50 years.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
better yet, include a copy of ubuntu
Play the statistics. Tip the entire pile of 200 CDs into the time capsule bin. You gain exactly zero advantage by putting them in the landfill, and have a "maybe one will work" if you forward them to the future. I don't know about you, but I'll take a "maybe" over a "guaranteed zero" any day.
What 1959 technology would you like to see run? A turntable? A TV? How about a Radio? We still have all those things, but now, they are cheaper (adjusted for inflation) and better.
So much of the experience of a current "computer" has nothing to do with the hardware, it's the content. So the virtualization ideas, etc have some merit.
50 years from now, how "cool" is old hardware going to be? Not very I expect. They will have better cheaper computers.
IMHO, you'd be better off including lots of pictures and printed material that will be usable, toss in some hw too, even if it won't work. In the end, I suspect an old yearbook will be more interesting than a computer.
Meh, that's just my 2 cents worth.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This actually brings up perhaps the biggest problem with the project.Where will they find a battery for the bios?
While some bios will boot (to default settings) without a bios battery installed most will simply fail post, hard.
Will a battery, even still in the original packaging, even hold a charge for 50 years? If you look back, battery technology has advanced quite a bit in the last 50 years and there is every indication that this will continue for the next 50 years so getting a hold of the exact battery (or even a similar one) that the bios needs may be impossible.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
It would be better not to put them all in one place.
If you are going to get 200 CDs pressed, you'd do well to keep a few dozen of them in your capsule, and distribute the rest.
If it's a project at a school, insert a copy of the CD in the back of every copy of that year's yearbook. Make sure to send several copies of the yearbook with the CD insert to all the local libraries in the area. Chances are that will ensure that at least one of them will survive for 50 years. At least in my area, the libraries have yearbooks from all the local schools going back to the 40s, which I presume is when they started producing them. (They have class photos going back a lot further than that, too.)
In general, if you can make information interesting (or at least package it with something interesting), you can practically let other people do all the archival work for you.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Store copies of the Duke Nukem series on various forms of media and store it with it. Someone will throw it up on the then-ebay and a geek will buy it, the geek being compelled to play the prequels to Duke Nukem Forever the way they were meant to be played.
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