Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can Your Hardware Top 18 Years and Ten Months? (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by timothy on from the old-enough-to-vote dept.

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.

9 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. 18 years? by mitcheli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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;
    1. Re:18 years? by Muros · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not just government, lots of large companies will have things quietly churning away in the background that people don't get rid of because they've been there so long nobody knows what they are and they're afraid to touch. I've seen Avions running DGUX that have only recently been scrapped. A customer last year asked us to have a look at something, and I'm not really sure what it was, it looked like an old dumb terminal with 2 5.25" floppy drives built into it, we just handed to some guys about to retire to look at. I looked at a SCO Xenix system within the last 6 months. Just this week, I saw an AIX server that isn't used but is kept around just in case they need to look up old accounts. I had a look at it out of curiousity, and saw the radiusd process chewing up processor time so gave it a reboot, first time it was restarted since Oct 2009.

    2. Re:18 years? by dissy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yea 18 years is nothing. That's only 1998.

      I still have my Apple //e that was bought for me when I was 13 years old, which still functions and typically sees usage once or twice a year still. I last had it powered on this past summer.
      It was made in 1983 and so even saw plenty of usage by its previous owner for a whole decade before it came to me.

      That's a 33 year old piece of still functional equipment, the vast majority of being original hardware.
      If I care to daisy-chain together the proper networking gear again, it can even browse the Internet. (Localtalk to t-base-2 to 10-base-t to my main 10/100/1000 switch)

      I even have some 5.25" floppies that can still be written to and read from afterwards (hearts to ADTPro), though I mainly use a CFFE3000 card with a USB flash drive containing all my floppy disk images.

      I also still own a NeXT slab workstation (1988), a SparcStation IPX (1989?), and an SGI o2 (1996)
      Although those systems haven't been pulled out of storage and booted in some time. They at least worked 12ish years ago before I last moved.

      I have an 8" floppy drive and controller for the Apple 2 as well, and although the drive doesn't currently work due to a couple worn belts, assuming no other problems have since happened that would be an easy thing to fix. I would be concerned over the condition of the r/w heads after all this time though.

      I have a Novation CAT 300bps acoustically coupled model which wikipedia claims was introduced in 1981 (and looks identical to the picture at the top of the page), although I must admit it only came to my hands in the mid to late 90's, and I only used it once on a lark and have since lost the power adapter for it. I haven't bothered looking up the voltage/amperage it needs to find a replacement (why oh why wasn't printing that info on the label or by the jack always the standard practice?!)

      I always cringe when I hear others refer to 1990's or newer hardware as "anciently old", and I'm not even close to the age of the people around when the computing foundations were laid. (I blame my parents)

  2. Netware 3 by slaker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:486 in 2010 by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There was a tweet from a guy who kept his Nintendo Super Famicom (SNES) turned on since the mid 90s to avoid losing his saved game. Dead battery in the cartridge, you see.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Re:486 in 2010 by torqer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While working IT support back in the day -- in the summer 2002: The company I was working for was opening a new location up, and the day before the building inspectors came to give us our occupancy inspection the IBM PS/2 computer that was originally installed to control the HVAC system on some bizarre serial connection had it's motherboard fry completely. I guess the life of span of it didn't match original poster's...

    However,I had an old PS/2 in a closet, and it was the same model. We swapped the hard drive out, installed my old system, and had it up and running with enough time adequately cool the building...

    It was still running in 2010 when I was last in that building.

    The best part of story was when the manager of the HVAC company came with $3000 to compensate me. I probably would have just been happy with getting the job done. But apparently PS/2 parts are fairly hard to find on a day's notice, even back in the early 2000s. I've always wondered what sort of penalty structure the HVAC company had built into their contract.

  5. I passed up a job over this by vinn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. My Aunt's 286 by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  7. Server 54 was walled off by steveha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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