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Can Your Hardware Top 18 Years and Ten Months? (theregister.co.uk)
DesertNomad points out this article at The Register "about a fairly aged Pentium-based server that lasted 18+ years without much in the way of service." Reminds me that I have a pair of working, occasionally used, Pentium-based notebooks (more like lug-books), one of which is a 1999 Thinkpad, and the other a 1996 CTX. I'm sure there are plenty of boxes out there that have survived at least 18 years and that are in daily or constant use. The fans are always the tricky part! What's your best personal hardware-survival stories? I have some keyboards in active service that were made in 1984, and probably some of them go back well before that, but keyboards should last that long.
Clearly you haven't worked for the Government. My favorite was the mainframes built in the '60's that we were trying to retrofit into more modern day laptops using an emulator card.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
206 months? I have underwear that is older than that. Most of it unwashed.
I used an old 486 system who had a single job it did well. It ran some legacy software which interfaced with some ancient spectroscopic instrument which graphed the frequency output of our Ti:Sapph oscillator. I never gave the thing much of a look because it just worked... dead PS fan and all. I bet that it's still running.
My brain has been going for decades, and not only have I not been able to upgrade it I've been actively degenerating it's performance.
I'm running a 15" Macbook Pro C2D from 2007, no repairs. I think that's quite decent for a laptop. Might replace the hard drive with an SSD soon. I am using a newer computer for gaming though.
I am dealing with Desktops that were bought in 1994, that makes them 21 to 22 years old and still running.
They are RS6000, AIX4.3 desktops.
I have some servers here that are about the same age.
35 years old. I still play about 2 or 3 hours of "Lemonade Stand" a day.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
My old Kaypro I is still working! Got it in '86. Go C/PM!
While keyboards CAN last a long time, dude....no. Think about it; they are the recipient of your grimy fingers, day in/day out. They are more disgusting than *anything* else in your house, pillows and toilets included.
Keyboards should be replaced yearly given how disgusting they are.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The motherboard, CPU, memory are about the most reliable things in a computer. As long as the capacitors weren't part of the "bad capacitors" era, these pieces can last for a very, very long.
The parts that wear out are the moving parts, and the power supply. Power supplies tend to be things that can just suddenly go, especially the cheaply made ones. Though it's still not unheard of for one to last 18 years. A HD lasting 18 years is pretty stunning.
With SSD replacing spinning disks, long lived hardware will become even more common.
My dad used an XT clone for his normal, daily use home computer from the early 80's to around 2005. Eventually he bought a used Dell that lasted him the rest of his life in order to be able to send and receive email.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Still running DOS 6.22 and windows 3.11 with win32 (for freecell) since about 1996.
And I have machines that old which still work. I'm not even counting the 80s home computers. I think it's customary to close with a remark about something uphill both ways and get off my lawn or something.
It depends on whether the license for any non-free operating system or applications running on said mainframes could be transferred into an emulator.
Can we simultaneously run a "how long is my penis", er, I mean, "how low is my uid" competition?
because most of that equipment was probably made in usa!
Being an active collector and avid user of old HP calculators, I can beat that 18 year mark with ease and comfort. My HP-41 from 1983 is in almost daily use. My HP-27 from 1976 is still going strong just like an HP-9815 from the same year and my HP-67 from '77. My HP-35 from 1972 is working just fine. As are some 70+ other old HP calcs.
I can't remember the name of it but there's an old pc based linux dns server someone has that had 10 years of uptime about 10 years ago. I'm sure it's still up, can't remember the name though.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I had my iPhone 6 for 9 months until the 6s was released, then retired it.
I just replaced a dual-processor AMD Athlon MP system I'd built back in 2001 that's been running 24x7 its entire life. It started out as my primary desktop machine and became my Linux server in 2009. I replaced the the thing with an Intel NUC.
I have an old dumb flip phone that has survived maybe not a while (I got it in '08) but has survived some pretty rough treatment. Besides the common accidental drop on concrete from my clumsiness or my tendency to toss the phone across the room for various reasons; the phone has survived being run over by delivery drivers, in the rain, while on a gravel parking lot, a water logged ceiling tile falling on it, and being stepped on by cleats. The only thing that doesn't work on it anymore is the front camera screen.
We recently retired some Cisco 2500 series routers that had uptimes of 15 and 18 years.
Meaning, they had been running non-stop without being reset or rebooted the entire time.
I had to take a picture of the output of the show version command just because :)
A customer of mine has a Netware 3 server running on a 1994-vintage IBM machine. It runs and makes reports from an inventory database they use. I was selected as the new IT guy for that customer on the basis that I'm the youngest person they could find with first-hand Netware experience. I'm 40.
Another customer I deal with has an IBM System/38 in his private office. He still has an active terminal for it. He's a photographer but I think in another life he was an engineer. He will not tell me what that thing does, but I do know he has a lot of hush-hush secrets around his (film) photo printing processes.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
So it's not 18 years, but my ten year old laptop is going fine. Only problem is having to change the batteries every ~18 months. Someday they're going to stop selling 'em.
I've got a Compaq Portable III from 1987 with one of the earlier examples of a plasma screen (with four glorious shades of orange). Still works great!
Some friends and I run a BBS on an old Dell Dimension from the mid-90s. The box was used when it was repurposed around 2000 and is still running the OS from that build so the current configuration is about 15-16 years old and the hardware (except for the hard drive) is 19-20 years old. In 2011, the hard drive started to fail so, I changed the hard drive, then handed it off to someone else when I started my vagrant phase in 2013. Before I got it and after I handed t off, it was running in garages with no heating or AC. Chugging away year after year. I'm supposed to be taking over care and feeding again but the current caretaker hasn't gotten around to sending it. If it ever shows up on my doorstep, I'll probably take a shot at making an image that I can put on a VPS. Or at least get it on something more modern and compact.
I have a NEC Silentwriter Superscript 660i laser printer that I convinced my parents to buy for me in high school (in 1995) when I became the editor for our school paper. Microsoft Publisher 95 on a cutting edge Pentium 160, good times.
The thing is an absolute beast and just won't die. For part of its life it was used as a primary office printer at a startup company too, printing thousands and thousands of pages. Just a workhorse. It's so ancient I've had to use HP Laserjet 4P drivers since Windows XP, because they never made drivers for it newer than Windows 9x.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Um maybe....
When I worked at a local University, I had been browsing Phrack Archives and noticed a list of all known VMS nodes. It included some of ours, and, as I remember, one of them was still in use. Since I left in 2005, and the machine was not decommed until a few years after that (or so I heard), it could have been going 18 years or more.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I have a couple first generation US Nintendos (NES) that still work fine. One of them needs to have the game inserted in the game genie to work (I guess the game genie was slightly wider than a standard game so that has widened the interface so games without the game genie are loose). I can't say it has had consistent or daily use for some time although it has been pulled out a couple times a year, and I've never had a problem of it not working (I'm sure the lack of moving parts helps).
I believe my dad has a couple old Atari 400/800s in the garage somewhere that I'd love to try and set up one day. When I was very young (2-3) he would set it up on the TV with two controllers and we'd play games like Star Raiders together. What I didn't know at the time was that the second controller didn't even work, not that it mattered as it was really about spending the time together.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
A place was throwing out an XT after many years use an all-day, every day WP machine.
I rescued it and used it for debugging old network cards, reading floppies etc.
Dragged it out the other day for fun - MFM HD chugged into life and green screen perfect.
Keyboard is of course the immortel IBM one.
Boy, they built those things well - look inside and the thickness of the metal, the cables and insulation, everything is just more solidly built than today's boxes.
Yeah, yeah, I know...the lawn...
I have a TI-59 programmable calculator from 1977.
Still works, including the magnetic card reader, after 39 years.
C64 from the early 80s, Amiga 1200 from the early 90s (the old floppies still read OK, too). Assorted consoles. Although they've only been lightly used for the nostalgia in the last decade or two...
10.5 years with out os updates? or software ram leaks?
I had a web server at home that was chugging along on a ten year old Opteron 165 until about 4 months ago when the mobo died. I'm sure it had another ten years left in it, but it just wasn't worth it to buy a replacement socket 939 board.
DCT2000's cable boxes are still running on lot's of cable systems they may only have like 2-3 hours of guide data.
I have a 1982 ZX Spectrum 48K locked away in the garage. Get it out every 5 years or so and hook it up to the nearest TV.
Never fails to start, nor to bring on waves of nostalgia.
Have a huge pile of C15 cassettes (anybody remember these?) loaded with games ....... most typed in from copies of Sinclair User.
The only snag I have is a dodgy Sharp cassette player which means loading the games is now really hit-and-miss (not that it was ever reliable ....)
A couple of weeks ago I dragged my two boys (9 and 12) away from their quadcore 8Gb Minecraft rigs to come and see this fossil running Deathchase.
They announced that the graphics were "worse than Minecraft" and walked off.
Kids.
Dell latitude c400 from 2001 with a pentium-m. Used regularly as an SSH terminal with a high quality 4:3 panel, all magnesium case, I really think they had something going there. Beats a modern netbook.
At work I have 3 VAX's running VMS 5.4 and 2 PDP-11's running RSX-11M. They only run about one week every other month though. We use them to support customers who are running the same hardware.
I have a Sun Ultra 2 from 1996 still running as a production server. I belive the hard drives have been replaced but apart from that it's still running just fine.
I interviewed for what otherwise would have been an awesome job. While viewing the data center they built onsite (this was a "campus" style environment), I was horrified. Sitting in the racks were Cisco networking equipment I didn't recognize, or at least knew as soon as I saw it that the model numbers were ancient. The servers appeared well beyond the end of life, but I couldn't tell at first glance. Digging deeper I found NT 4.0 still running in a production environment. A lot of the core equipment was 14 - 15 years old with probably the median age of the servers being about 8 or 9 years old. I presented them with a plan and budget to replace it all. At a minimum, doing all implementation in house and being frugal, I got it down to $500k over three years. The CEO didn't think it was necessary despite some detailed but non-technical explanations. I promptly turned the job down. Since then they've burned through 3 IT directors, each frustrated with supporting crap and getting no capex.
----- obSig
We believe it was assembled for her in 1986/87 using the cheapest parts we could find in Toronto. Still running MS-DOS 3.1.
But, it was used basically every day from when we gave it to her until her death last August. We had to replace the monitor with a flat screen and the keyboard was replaced at least twice (thank god for USB to PS2 adapters). (Epson) dot-matrix printer still running tickety-boo and "compatible" ribbons can still be found at Staples.
She used it for letter writing and refused any suggestion that she should get a "new" one.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Was assuming this was 18 continuous years of UPTIME. Back when computers were workstations and kernels were written by real programmers, the Silicon Graphics (not SGI) Indigo in my office stayed up for almost two years, through several LAN reconfigurations and a few of thunderstorms. Solid.
As reported on Slashdot in June of 2015 this Commodore Amiga has been running the heating system for the Grand Rapids Michigan school district for over 30 years.
But, the really interesting bit is that the original developer shows up in the comments under the handle Jeff. Twitter @jhanson68 He was a high school student when he wrote the application an it was still running up to a few months ago.
I got one as a freebie when it was ~9 years old, used it as my main machine until 2001 (it was 12 years old by then). Its secrets: a Daystar 68040 accelerator board and a ludicrous amount of RAM for its day (32 Mb).
i'm surprised a seagate drive lasted that long... but i'm guessing they were actually good drives back in the 90s. It is a shame that they are retiring the computer just due to a hard drive error.
Kind of wish I still had a late 90s computer to run windows 98 and play some old games. Emulation is there, but it's not the same.
I've got a packard bell pentium 133 that still works but I rarely use it now that I have dosbox. The hard drive on my 486DX66 mhz laptop with a black and white screen bit the dust about 6 years ago but it will still boot up off floppies.
I've got a working one of those, even put in the 387 math co-processor and maxxed the RAM to 16 MB. However, I can't use it cause the hard drive died and I can't find any working IDE hard drives small enough for it to communicate with.
Seriously. Please. Why are PeeCee weenies so impressed when something runs for more than a day without a reboot?
I still know of VAXen and AS/400's running with >20 years of uptime. Certainly these things need to be replaced, but they're still running, still working hard and still stable and fresh like the day whey were first IPL'd. :(
A good laptop can last a long time.
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT Laptop I rescued from a electronic recycling place I worked at. It lived its life at a university and seems like it was only ever indoors and not moved around or used much. It is still like new. The original hard drive shows it was being used until around 2007 and I got it around 2011.
Must of been from around 1996 or 1997 as the original 2GB drive has Windows 95 on it. Its a Pentium MMX 133 MHz, 32MB on board RAM It also came with the caddy with floppy drive, CD-ROM and a Microsoft PS2 mouse.
The battery still lasted an hour but not so much now. Still replacement batteries can still be purchased which suprised me.
I put a old Samsung 40GB PATA drive in it but the BIOS can only see the first 8GB which is fine as its fast and equivalent of replacing a HDD with a SSD in a modern system. Installed Windows 98SE and searched online finding Toshiba's old support website for drivers and it runs great. I even put it online using a PCMCIA 802.11b wireless card just for shits and giggles. Transferring files is easy with a 2GB SD card and a PCMCIA adaptor which can be hot pluggable like USB.
I got it so I can run any old DOS software particularly old ham radio/transceiver programming software but I couldn’t help going back and playing The Need For Speed and Command & Conquer Red Alert. Red Alert was slow from reading the CD in the CD-ROM but was flawless using a ISO from the hard drive. Even doing VGA out to my TV worked fine.
I only paid $20 for the lot, I offered to pay even though they were going to scrap it. More recently I paid over $50 for a Kingston 128MB RAM stick from USA (to Australia) so I could bump it up to its maximum 160MB.
The design of it is much better than laptops of today, things like a sliding cover over the power button, line input jack as well as headphone and mic jack (laptops now combine mic and line in) and a physical volume dial.
I also scored a Toshiba 386 laptop with 8MB RAM and Windows 3.1 which I gave to a friend for his radio tranceiver programming. I also am keeping in my collection a Toshiba Tecra A3X PTA3XA Pentium M laptop 2GB RAM with Windows XP, 3 batteries and a beautiful high res screen for my 2000s gen collection. This baby has a 3 separate covers on the bottom to easilly change the CPU, RAM and add-on cards.
We have a bunch of old Dell servers where I work that are from the early 2000's (around the time when the Pentium /// was new) that are still chugging away running Windows 2000. They're only used for trouble shooting old versions of software running at plants that haven't updated to newer versions yet, but they still run mostly problem free. They're finally being retired now, but I'm sure some of the database servers will be kept just in case they're needed for some reason or another. The biggest problem we've had with them is that the battery on the RAID card tends to blow up and destroy the motherboard if not caught quickly.
Although the plastic has yellowed considerably, the calculator that got my dad through school still works perfectly! The leather holster for it has seen better days, however.
Yes, it is a slide rule - it's been years since I actually used it to calculate something, but it certainly is still functional.
Apart from that, my old TI-99/4A booted up last time I tried a few years back (Parsec!), but it's been in the attic ever since. It did run almost daily from 1979 until I got an Apple IIc in... 1985 or 1986 or so
Here's the developer's first comment. It's pretty deeply buried, so I thought I'd make it easy for you lazy bastards.
http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/#comment-2076131925
One of the first cheap Linux ARM devices I got a hold of was a Linksys NSLU2 that was meant as a slow low powered device that could convert any USB drive into as network NAS device. A huge fanbase figured out how to hack full Debian Linux into the device and how to remove a resistor to "overclock" it to normal speeds. 100mhz to 166 mhz I believe if memory serves. It ended up to be my webserver using a USB stick as it's main filesystem for 1000+ days of continuous uptime before a 6 hour power black-out completely drained the UPS it was attached to. I've long since switched to a AMD athlon 610e system running VMs but it's going to be hard to beat my own personal record. :)
I know a business still dependent on a Wang system from late 80's to run software written for a Wang mini-frame in the early 80’s/ 70’s.
They trade parts with the DOD as apparently their system and one the Airforce uses in CA are the only ones running in the U.S. And I think the Airforce uses theirs to emulate outdated historical Russian systems.
Still running. Sadly, my second Taskmaker disk is corrupted so I can't play my favorite game.
We have a VAXstation 4000 Model 90 purchased in 1992, running VAX/VMS 5.4 still in use to drive the device that switches the telescope beam to different instruments. Luckily, we had several of them at one time so we have a source of spare parts, but we've really only had to replace a power supply once and a couple of disks (do you know how hard it is to find 4GB SCSI disks these days?).
bought in 1983, can still play munchman and TI Invaders
But can it run Windows 10? :D
I managed to convince a user to give up their nine-year-old PC with Windows ME for a modern PC with Windows XP. I brought the old system back to my cube, popped open the case, and found a grapefruit-sized dust bunny in the bottom of the case. An almost perfect sphere of accumulated dust. Now that was a conversation piece.
Not as impressive as 18yrs, but I've personally been using a Western Digitial (maybe Maxtor, have to double check) 120GB 5400RPM EIDE HDD - almost 24/7 - for around 10 years (maybe more?).
No issues at all whatsoever. Much isn't written to it anymore, but it's read a lot.
For most of it's life, it's been sitting in an aluminum CoolerMaster "Wave Master" (TAC-T01-E1C) case right behind two 80mm intake fans (stock).
I know of a supermicro server still in use, all original hardware, that was donated by Craigslist to my org about 10 years ago. Still works fine. *knocks wood*
My first "IBM-Compat" PC, I assembled it from Egghead Auction parts in the early spring of 1998. It hasn't been on constantly since then, but I would say it's been in use one way or another for 90% of that time at least. Currently it runs NetBSD for some BIND and minor web serving things on the local network (as well as a remote dev box). I've gone through a number of optical drives and a CMOS battery or two, but everything else is original, down to the generic ergonomic keyboard.
I will actually be sad the day that it gives up the ghost.
Reminds me of an ars techica member decomming a NetWare server that was up for 16 and a half years.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/epic-uptime-achievement-can-you-beat-16-years/
My local bowling alley still features CRT monitors with those early 1990's style scoring machines. They have to be more than 25 years old.
The specs needed for office and home computing have pretty much flat-lined, and 10 year old hardware (so long as it survives) is often more than adequate for the task, with exception for gaming.
For years Microsoft was able to ride the upgrade cycle as memory and CPU improvements moved closer and closer to satisfactory performance, and people had incentive to upgrade to better, faster hardware. Now, performance is less limited by memory and CPU as it is bandwidth. OEM OS sales plateaued, and Microsoft had to get far more aggressive and change its business model to a subscription model. If users don't upgrade, take control of the computer and force the upgrade. Computers are now turning into kiosks to the Microsoft mothership.
There's probably a "In Soviet Microsoft, OS upgrades YOU!" joke applicable here.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Damn, and I thought my 2009 Dell laptop (still humming merrily after 6 years of daily use) was special. I'll come back in another ten years.
On that note, though, most people abuse their computers so badly they barely last 2-3 years.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Please, we have Amigas from the mid-80's still running..
I programmed various programmable logic controllers manufactured and installed in 80-s working in dusty factories, garbage dumps, old and rusty sections of power plants. People who programmed them have all retired, but those machines continue to work for a very long time. Makes me feel strange when I use latest c# or javascript toys at work.
I ran a 486 on a MRBIOS based motherboard from ~1992-1994 as a desktop computer.. At which point it was upgraded to a DX/2-66 where it ran as a fileserver until ~1997, at which point it was turned into a linux firewall. A state it existed in until 2010 when I got an internet connection faster than it could handle.
18 Years of continuous activity is not bad.I have a lot of old computers that still work. The oldest is probably an apple ][+ at this point, as I found a good home for my SWTPC a few years back.Those computers from the 70's and 80's are pretty much bulletproof. The ones from the 90's are susceptible to HD failures and the ones from the 2000's seem to be made out of crap (bad caps, and all kinds of other undiagnosable failures).
I guess you just can't kill it.
I've got a 110baud accoustic coupler with a 25-pin RS-232 that I hooked up to one of my boxen a year or so ago just for laughs, and it still works. Does that count?
This is all bizarre to me. I recently purchased and upgraded a Packard Bell Legend 125. I swapped out the 486SX 25 for am unused Cyrix DX2 80 and added 16mb of ram. I also upgraded the vram with 512kb 20-pin ZIP module which none of you have probably ever seen. It flies now!
Alas, gonna test Salix (486) on it, just for the kicks, since most Linux distributions no longer accept such old machines. Yeah, Lubuntu, yeah, right... no Ubuntu-based distribution will play on older hardware. Just go for Xubuntu: Xfce is still better than LXDE (though I still need to check LXQt as of late).
In truth, it was decommissioned (i.e. getting dust on a corner); my most ancient hardware recently used must be some 14~15 years old -- and even so mostly as test machine (because I got me more modern PCs).
I'm engaged on a campaign to try to make distributions for older machines work better with AMD ones by dropping the SSE instruction requirements in certain apps (Midori, Qupzilla, Palemoon etc.) Chrome, too, but that may be hopeless. That's why Firefox is better, o' young ones.
Your lawn? I planted it.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/
has done pretty well on up-time.
I'll answer this in the form of a picture -.o; http://kupo.be/pics/oldsystems... If it's setup or in the cabinet it works, the oldest one is the BBC Micro on the far right which is still in regular use.
I have a working Compaq. There is no model number. It was/is the original clone of an IBM/XT. The only thing that no longer works is the 5 1/4" floppy disk drive through which you would boot. The B: drive still works, but the A: drive has been used far more often than they thought any human would ever use it. Luckily my father installed a hard drive(60 MB, huge!!!) so it has still been able to boot up. ;)
That was the computer on which I learned all about computer hardware and upgrading hardware, etc. I maxed out that machine with as much memory as it could handle(640k main memory and 2M expanded memory). That sounds almost silly to persons in the current scheme of things, but upgrading from 512k to 640k actually made the system quite a bit better. DOS was actually able to run three programs at the same time(as simultaneous as DOS would allow
I heard my father was going to donate it to Goodwill several years ago and with some persuasion I expressed my desire to have that computer to return back to my childhood days. I have not turned it on in the last few month, but it was working just fine last year. It just takes about 5 minutes to boot into DOS.
I have some old IBM boxes here that are very well engineered and constructed, almost as solid as old HP gear, but the heat they put out is outrageous by today's standards so they got replaced. I get them out for special projects but even with SDDs etc. the improved performance does not greatly mitigate the problem with wasted energy.
That's 19 years!
I have had a couple of web & mail servers run 4.5 years continuously, with no maintenance and no reboots, but eventually the PSUs failed. I then quit the business - too much maintenance work...
I have an old Mac G4/500 mhz running as a mail server (EIMS) that dates from 3/2000. I've upgraded the drives (RAIDED SSDs), added 2 SATA controllers and a network card (for multihoming). But it's really solid.
Runs OS X 10.3.9. Does one thing really well.
Last time I turned it on was a decade ago and it worked with an old TV set using the modulator...
I no longer have the TV set. Seen a few articles over the years on solutions using modern monitors... might look into it one day.
Probably less hassle tho to just go through ebay for old school monitors... but it would be interesting to see if it still fires up and playing "Syndicate" is still as much fun.
manufacture date 1986.
It was running continuously (used to be a workstation for an electron microscope system at a university, and in my possession it was a mail server, even well past the point at which replacing it would have been the smart thing to do) except for one hard drive replacement until early 2008.
Even today, I'm 100% sure it would boot without issue if it were turned back on. 3-slot desk-side VME-bus machine with convective cooling and some of the highest quality circuits boards and components I have ever seen in real life. I gave it to a friend, who has definitely used it since then for entertainment purposes, but it no longer does any work for a living.
for you challenged in maths, that's 22 years of continuous use. and as of last know it STILL worked, which, at 30, makes it older than most of you I'll bet.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
My high school had a bunch of Apple IIgs and IIe computers in the "computer lab" around 1996. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they're still there.
I once ran a Macintosh Performa 5215CD for six and a half years ( 1995+) without a shutdown. It was still operational when it was replaced by a G4 Power Mac desktop in 2002. The funny part of the story , however, is this model's reputation amongst the Mac faithful at a time when Apple's prospects were looking ever more tenuous day by day. It's usually referred to as a "Road Apple" and considered one of the worst Macs ever released. For me, it was one of the best computers I've ever owned.
It had all the options available for this machine (plug in boards) which included a full TV tuner, a video encoder / decoder board, the CD-ROM drive which powered my music collection via a reasonably competent HiFi (NAD receiver; Energy loudspeakers), and a voice/data modem with, I swear, the best telephony application I've ever ran or am aware of (MegaPhone, Cyprus Research). It's service as my telephone answering system was the reason for it's 24/7 operation.
Megaphone was purchased by someone,can't remember who, and never properly updated ... the feature set shrank and never recovered ... when OSX v10.0+ was introduced. There is currently an app with that name, but it's completely unrelated.
This was an all-in-one Mac, Motorola 603e PowerPC @ 75 MHz, maxed RAM (64 MB), 1 MB VRAM, 15" Trinitron monitor, 4x CD-ROM, OS 7.5.1 (running OS9.1 when retired), $2300 but I won a $500 rebate in a promotion Apple was running at the time (most buyers got $100 off).
However, I can claim another longevity feat, kind-of-sort-of on topic ... the Motorola 68000 CPU, the very same chipset that ran Apple's original Macintosh from 1984 ... is the CPU that Mazda used for the Engine Management Computer when my Miata rolled off the assembly line in Hiroshima, Japan, on February, 1990.
It's still running the motor. I can't claim the continuous uptime, but the car does have 300,000 Km (186,500 Miles) on the original engine, and still runs like a top. I drive it like I stole it, with full-throttle runs to the 7,200 RPM redline in every gear at least once every month, and usually more often.
When I first started working in IT as an intern, we had a policy of replacing computers after 4 years. The company was mostly engineers and embedded software developers who didn't like to part with stuff, so people generally fought the upgrade and the cycle was closer to every 6 years. There was no real policy about retired equipment, so it was common for IT guys to take old machines home after wiping the drives (keep in mind this was when the hardware obsolescence curve was at its steepest, so 4 year old stuff was near worthless). Around 2010 we retired a bunch of Dell D800 and D630 laptops, most of which were heavily (ab)used. I took a D800 manufactured in 2004 home with me to use for practice setting up various server functionality, expecting it to die within a few months. It's now been sitting on a shelf in my closet for 6 years running windows XP 24/7 and hosting the following:
- Dual DHCP/DNS server
- Apache http server
- SVN server (this was invaluable during college, used it to sync homework and group projects)
- Calibre ebook library
- Client to keep my IP synced up with whatever replaced dyndns
- Mumble server
- TS3 server
- cygwin / ssh so I can tunnel in to my home network - Occasional TF2 server
- Occasional minecraft server
Last time I had to open the lid of the thing was 2 years ago when we had a power outage that exceeded the battery life and caused it to shut down. I'm trying to slowly replace all the functionality with a BSD based box, but so far it's been really hard to let go of that laptop after it's worked so well for so long.
>The fans are always the tricky part!
In my experience, the capacitors are the tricky part. You have no way of knowing how well manufactured they were... until they start failing.
I have some proprietary servers running in an old analog CATV headend that I'm responsible for maintaining. I received end of support notices (i.e a few years after they stopped producing them) from the manufacture my first year at this job. I'll be celebrating 9 years with the company in April.
When I graduated from college in 1983 I was given a HP15C. It's 33 years old, well traveled, and still going strong. I've used it since it was given to me and have never purchased or received another calculator. I'll plan to pass it down to my daughter.
Still works. Use it as a notepad. Four AA batteries keeps is running for a month. Great keyboard.
Had a client about 15 years ago that needed a "firewall" for their cable modem, I told them to dig a computer out of the trash and we'd turn it into a Linux firewall. A couple of years later the hard drive died and it was barfing errors on the console. They were able to run it for another 6+ months by making sure it was never rebooted.
Do you have ESP?
Only 4 years, not 18+, but still a good story. At University of North Carolina they took an inventory of their servers and realized they couldn't find one. Eventually by following cables they discovered that it had been sealed up behind a new wall, four years previously. The server had been chugging along with no problems during that that whole time.
http://www.informationweek.com/server-54-where-are-you/d/d-id/1010340?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Sort of a computer, my HP45 calculator and it's trusty 4004 from 1973 still sees use. I still prefer RPN to algebraic calculators.
HDD was replaced a few times, last one that is in it which still works is a 10MB. Other than no internal battery for keeping time and the bezel being yellowed, it still powers up and runs fine. The CGA monitor even looks good when in Tandy's deskmate or even dosshell.exe. All it offers is sentimental value and sees a boot every few years when I find it in the basement again.
In 2010 I was at a cold war site built in 1970, they were just getting around to transferring the mission from the original custom-built mainframes (Bell) to a few Sun servers. One of the driving factors was the lack of paper punch card readers to get system updates into the old system. I have few of the 80-column cards as souvenirs.
The savings in power alone paid for the project in less that 3 years.
Wang CS or VS? Some of it interchanges with the 2200.
If so, I may have working spares. AFAIK my 2200MVP and 2200LVP still work.
hurfy
(when i bother to log in)
Almost anyway :)
My Laserjet 5 is 17 years and 10 months old !
Almost 800,000 pages so far and still in daily use.
Easy to top 18+yrs:
- Toshiba 610CT, 1995 (20+yrs), Pentium 90, currently running FreeBSD as a webserver
- DEC MicroVAX 3/3500, 1987 (29 yrs), currently running Ultrix
- HP 200LX, 1994 (22 yrs), running DOS.
- several 486 PC's running DOS or FreeBSD, still in active (even daily) use (from about 1990, 25 yrs). Also a 486DLC CPU PC (pre-i486, circa 1992).
The above are all still in active use, some machines with uptimes >3 years (time between reboots).
In addition, many old machines, still functional, though not really in active use, including:
SUN SPARC II workstation
DEC 11/03, 11/23, 11/73, MVAX2 (1980-1987)
I've a number of old IBM systems that still run fine, mostly PS/2 models both of the 85xx and 95xx models. With OS/2, they are bulletproof. Unfortunately, I'm finding computers and hardware from the 1990s are failing due to bad caps.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
The first server I ever ordered, configured and installed as a sys admin was an HP ProLiant DL380 G3 with an external scsi disk enclosure back in 2004. I still speak with the admin there now and apparently its still running, serving up archived files and some form creation software for historical data. It was on the docket for replacement for a solid 8 years while I was there but since it was so reliable and the company always managed to bombard IT with some crazy urgent project every year, it never managed to get replaced. The MoBo was replaced just a couple months after it was installed and I remember being scared that I had chosen a lemon... That's funny to think about now. Turns out it's a beast, having been turned off twice since the install date (not counting OS update reboots). Once for the MoBo replacement and once cause our idiot maintenance department didn't think we needed a backup generator until we had a 12 day power outage years ago. After losing millions of $$ in idle employee wages and lost orders, they finally decided to acquiesce ITs request for a generator. Apparently it rarely gets used and they generate regular p2v images of it so they can virtualize it when it fails, but they've decided to let it run it's course. A drive goes bad every 2 years or so, but they have a stockpile of drives from other, retired machines from that timeframe. That machine single handedly made me an HP Enterprise hardware fan.
I got rid of the laptops because they are dead-as-a-doornail-dead. But in short:
I have a Pentium 120 and a 233 (well just the MB now) that I kept until I re-assembled the Pentium III and retrofit the 5.25" floppy drives in it.
I have two Pentium 4's and an Athlon 700.
All of these machines still work, but I quit using them more than 8 years ago for noise/power reasons. That's why you turn these old things off. The ones with passive heatsinks live until the PSU bites it, but the ones with fans never live more than a year once turned off because the fans gum up, heat up, and some of them explode (which is what happened to the original video card in the Pentium 4 system.) And by explode, I mean plastic/metal shrapnel, not combustion.
Not continuous use, but impressive. Also Mac G3 tower running as an ASIP server from '98 to '12
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Granted it's more of a decoration at this point, but I have an Octane we still use occasionally. It's just a little over 18 years old now.
My two main stereos are a 1960 Bell and a '62 Zenith - both connected to older Roku players served by a NAS.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
I still have and use the same keyboard, my brother bought me 27 years ago, with a 286 PC (1Mb RAM, 100Mb HDD).
I have it connected via the original connector (I can't even remember what it's called (AT?)), to a PS/2, to a USB. So I can pretty much use it for any job that gets thrown at me.
Despite all the foods and beverages spilled into it, over the years, it works better that most new keyboards.
from 1989.
While a bit clunky, those things were pretty cool back in the day.
A new operating system...the vista preinstall lasted an hour or so before she asked me to replace with Kubuntu, which it's had ever since)
A new hard drive (daughterling pushed it off the end of a coffee table)
New hinges
New charger
Two new fans (I cleaned up the cpu and gpu and applied arctic silver before reseating the fan and heatsink)
3rd keyboard (said daughterling pulled off a number of the keys, 2nd got coffee spilled over it)
New powerboard
The screen will need to be replaced since there's a bunch of dead pixels in the middle of the screen, and the mouse buttons could do with being replaced since one of them is soft and doesn't click anymore
Other than that, it's running well.
-- Fuck Beta
My list includes a Timex Sinclair 1000, several 3 decade old Apple Macs and an Apple //c.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
I've got a Power Mac 8100 with a G3 upgrade kit in it. That machine just will. not. die.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
VMS cluster systems with continuous uptime that long. Whether they still contain hardware older than that is conjecture.
The last time it was rebooted was late 2002. Redhat linux. The system is supported by a power backup system so crazy that it has one employee that only maintains that system. I will ssh into it every 6 or so months and just laugh at the "top".
It is the HD that worries me the most. What is ironic is that I have prepared a replacement system for it about 4 times. So it has an i7 with an SSD that has a mirrored copy of the data ready to go; maybe that backup system will be replaced soon as well. The CTO and I are just letting this one ride for as long as we can.
I have a Macbook 165c with 8Mb of RAM and 40 Mb HDD still clocking away. Using it for conversion of Quicktake camera images and a few games I worked on back in the day. Battery is shot but she still boots fine.
- We dream of the stars. Now let us return to them.
For me and I just went over the hill. It can be played online too! ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fan lifetime is only an issue if you don't use double-ball bearing...
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
1977, Hello fortran
https://youtu.be/uL9NudhhSQE?t=1m20s
An old XT-machine (yep, Intel 8086) connected to a particle detector. The detector was connected to a card that slotted only in an XT machine, and the software was written specifically for that machine. The machine was chained to the desk, it was that valuable.
The oldest computer in regular use for me is a Toshiba Satellite (1996 vintage) that I have upgraded to Windows 98, and is the only native diskette-equipped machine I still have. It has a PCMCIA wireless adapter (!) so it's on the network, and it has an ALL-11P programmer attached to it. I (though ALL-11P software will run in WINE, so I should really re-organise the place a bit and find a USB-serial that the software can use to find the programmer)
I recently used it to create boot diskettes for an HP16500A logic analyser - that was a bit of a trick, since the diskettes have to be 77 track and not 80 track, and the software to do that was written back in the MS-DOS days and will not run on anything later than Win98, and certainly won't run on USB-connected diskette drives.
I'm writing this post on my Amiga 1200 that I got in 1994, so that's coming up for 22 years. I'm still using my Digita Wordsworth mouse mat too.
Admittedly I just fired it up specifically to do this but even so, still going!
Our oldest system is a white box Dell tower running NT Server. I really don't want to know how old it is. It does have USB ports though, so I would suspect 2001 or thereabouts.
In a disk array for an HP-150B system. Along with a 9111A digitizer older than the entire system. The drives have not failed since installation in 1989.
Several companies, including my last employer are still using 20+ year old DOS-based systems for metrology and process control. why spend millions to replace what works? To keep up with the [insert your industry's leaders here] joneses?
I think the oldest system that isn't an embedded system is a CP/M based system using almost extinct hard-sectored minifloppies. It took me three or four months to find what I was told was the last new/unused batch of hard sectored minifloppies in existence. They had used just one of that batch of 600 when I left 10 years ago.
About 20 Z80 based embedded systems from 1981 are still in use. The only parts that fail are the mechanical parts and fortunately there are loads of spares from companies replacing them with newer half-million-dollar systems running windoze that actually are harder to use and fail more.
If you do your maintenance, just about any old bit of hardware will last longer than you, your kids, grandkids, great grandkids, and so on.
You need to present it in terms of risk. Risk to the business, and more specifically risk to the CEO. With these kinds of legacy systems, there is generally zero support for them outside of whatever they can cobble together in terms of internal staff, which by the sounds of it they do not have, nor are they likely to get given your experience. Eventually it *will* fail. Then what? Will anyone be able to bring it back online? How long might that take? Are they business critical services? If not able to bring back, then what is their recovery plan, if they even have one? How long to acquire and then migrate the system to something that will work? What effect will that have on the bottom line of the business. Lastly what will the repercussions be on the CEO that was aware of the situation, didn't nothing about it to try and mitigate that risk... Suddenly 500k may sound like a bargain.
Then again I've seen folks refuse to upgrade equipment because it was too expensive to do so (also 500k), attempt to get some other part of the business to accept the risk, then attempt to build a totally new system, in which just the migration project cost that, and the new system likely twice that... Which makes about zero sense, though part of that decision was based on adhering to an IT strategy that no longer included the previous technology, so there is those sorts complications as well.
Well, I have a working The Tabulating Machine Company card punch from 1901, s/n 58634, still punches cards, though I don't know if card reading systems are still in use anywhere. Would that count?
Schweitzer Engineering can claim 29 years and 9 months - that was one of the original microprocessor based electric power relays, still working when removed to be upgraded.
I've found that managers have a hard time conceptualizing data as an asset worth money. I had one manager task me with estimating the value for another project, questioned me on the results, and was pretty astounded when I broke it all down for him. Particularly when looking at data collection costs, the amount of years, and staff salary that went into it, various projects applied to the data, etc... adds up pretty quick. Cost of replacement...
A perfect example in somewhat recent times, are companies being acquired for pretty much just their data. Companies being bought for BILLIONS of dollars for their mapping divisions so that they could leverage their data in their own mapping application, or driving application or whatever. Other companies being bought for BILLIONS for what are essentially their installed user base, which has little to do with any traditional assets (technology, staff, physical presence) at all.
It is hard to convince managers to stop nickle and dimeing a system they don't want to spend the money to maintain when they have no idea how much the data that is collected is worth, and should the system fail what the implications of that are. Not to mention that many don't just "fail" but rather degrade overtime, introducing data integrity issues upon a perfectly good data repository and the implications that it has on the whole over time... In my own opinion systems and applications are seen as "sexy", but in reality it is all about the data when you come down to it, and what is important is how that is organized, systems just facilitate that (or not depending on how well they were designed or maintained).
Still running 24/7. Currently controlling a bunch of devices via a PCMCIA--> USB --> Serial adapter.
I have never seen an OS on x86 that could match the uptime of Netware. 25 years sounds about right if the rest of the hardware was able to hang on that long; I know I had first-gen pentiums run Netware for 10+ years when I was running them, and they were still running when I left that job 10+ years ago.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have a BBC Model B, a Sinclair +2, 2 Sinclair +3s, a 128k Spectrum, a Commodore 16 Plus 4, an Olivetti Prodest PC-1 (with monitor), and my oldest Pentium-class is a Dell Latitude CPi D266XT with several more machines from the same stable and of similar vintage. They all work. Oh, I have an Epson PX-4 as well which would work if I had a power adapter or a battery clip for it. Should I count my Psion Series 3?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
M C64 is over 30 years old now and still works fine as it did when I got it...and that after the processor and OS chips having been placed in the wrong way, a few falls, two moves to custom cases, and still very frequent use. Also, my old old old Pentium laptop still works fine running Linux. 18 years for a server that is designed to run stable 24x7 is really not that big of a deal. I also run eServers 235 and 325 that I bought used about 10 years ago without any issues and with plenty of RAM they are still quite speedy for servers.
My MITS Altair 8800 from 1975 is still going strong with no component failures since my father assembled it in 1975.. Can't say as much for the paper tape reader that died sometime in the mid 1980's..