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.

Comments

Re:I passed up a job over this

[vinn]

When companies don't value their IT assets and understand the importance of having "insurance policies" on their digital IP, it's probably not a place to work. This was clearly in the insanity realm. They had dual PIX firewalls set up in some kind of redundant mode. Good stuff. Except there was no way to get a Cisco (or any other) Smartnet contract on it. They had lost the enable password years before and no one understood exactly how the failover actually worked or the details of the settings on it. They were 14 years old. In the event the hardware failed, they would lose more money on one hour of credit card processing being down than simply replacing the hardware with a modern ASA. Production fileservers were well beyond any kind of support agreement. They probably had $1M of intellectual property sitting on them (in that if the data became corrupted that's how much they would be spending to recreate it.) We won't even get into things like PCI compliance.

This is Why Microsoft is Forcing Upgrades

[Irate Engineer]

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.