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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.

34 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.

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    1. Re:18 years? by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 2

      off the top of my head:
      * hp (tandem computers) himalaya - do they even have an off switch?
      * most commercial vax/vms deployments had/have uptime in decades
      * my recently decommissioned rsync server (supermicro with 2 super-inefficient xeons) had an uptime of 10.5 years (2 out of 3 PSUs had failed long time ago, 3rd one worked until i switched it off). annoyingly, the uptime value in kernel reset itself every 497 days.

    2. 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.

    3. 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)

    4. Re:18 years? by Solandri · · Score: 2

      I did some tow tank testing at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Research Center in the mid-1990s. It's a secure facility which makes money on the side by renting time to companies wishing to model test their ship designs in one of the world's longest tow tanks. So we had to have be escorted by Navy personnel at all times. About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked our escort what they were.

      "Hard drives."
      Bemused, I asked "What's their capacity?"
      "Oh, about 10 MB."
      "Damn, how old are they?"
      "1970s, maybe 1960s.
      "So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse when you replaced them and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
      "Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
      "..."

  2. 206 months? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    206 months? I have underwear that is older than that. Most of it unwashed.

  3. Me & My Brain by mveloso · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. My Commodore 64 by kamapuaa · · Score: 2

    35 years old. I still play about 2 or 3 hours of "Lemonade Stand" a day.

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    1. Re:My Commodore 64 by puddingebola · · Score: 2

      What was the temperature today?

  5. Re:old dns server ~20 years uptime by trybywrench · · Score: 2

    that can't be right, i'm remember wrong.

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    I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
  6. 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.

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  7. Batteries are the worst by Sowelu · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Batteries are the worst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      What I found with laptops what kills them is a few things

      Dirt. keep the fans and vents clean. I usually take a shop vac to mine. On rare occasions I *will* rip the thing apart and get the dirt out. Dirt=heat=failed parts.

      Torsion stress. Do you pick the things up and move them around alot? Put them on one of those laptop tables for sitting on a couch with. Something like this http://www.amazon.com/Premium-Natural-Surface-Detachable-Friendly/dp/B018PI22WM . You probably can find one for a better price I just picked the first one I found. My wife was doing just about as good as you. Once I got her one of those she went from 1-2 years to 4 years now. Also occasionally check the screws and make sure they are still snug. They work themselves loose.

      Also the next one you buy figure out where the power supply comes in. If you sit on a couch a lot this can mean the difference between a bum power connector and the thing lasting a good amount of time. Also pull all the wires off once and while and untangle them. I do that at least once a week. My wifes laptop comes in from a direction that is little stress on the laptop and cable. Mine on the other hand I have gone thru 3 power cables because I have to lay the power cable over the back and come in from the wrong side. Which is why I have taken to untangling them...

      Also move to SSD if you can.

      Also most laptop parts can be bought. They are seriously a pain to take apart usually though :(

  8. Re:Keyboards? by gmack · · Score: 2

    Or you can go with something like the HP washable. I love mine, it feels like a proper keyboard and every month or so I stick it under the kitchen sink and hose it off with hot water. It has lasted 4 years so far and I am not nice to keyboards.

  9. 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.

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  10. Re:Non-stop by Megane · · Score: 2

    And this is why IPv6 is taking so long to gain traction, amirite?

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    #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  11. 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.

  12. 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.

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    1. Re:I passed up a job over this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Fucking IT guys. "This equipment does the job fine, but it's old! We need throw at least half a million dollars at it!"

    2. Re:I passed up a job over this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Fixing a paid off car is always cheaper than financing a new one.

      You've never bought a German car...

    3. Re:I passed up a job over this by vinn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    4. Re:I passed up a job over this by Britz · · Score: 2

      $500k isn't very much over 3 years, is it? That should be about 2 mid level IT guys salary in the US. Don't you need more personnel to keep ancient stuff running?

      Couldn't you just make VMs and run most of that stuff from a single server, because of the sheer perfomance increase over time? Even if you needed to keep some of the old operating systems around for legacy software. VirtualBox, of all systems, supports surprisingly old operating systems. I think they have official support for Windows 2000 and you can run Win 9x on it.

  13. 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.

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  14. Re:Just a laptop. by vux984 · · Score: 2

    I did a SSD on a similiar macbook pro this year, along with a battery replacement. (i used ifixit actually). The stock drives are 5400rpm. It definitely makes a difference.

  15. Packad Bell by fadethepolice · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. Re:10.5 years with out os updates? by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 2

    it was a bastard of debian potato and woody. the dist-upgrade from potato to woody died in the middle and it continued in that half broken state until it was decommissioned. it only ran rsync+ssh on private IPs so security wasn't a concern. the greatest thing about it was that not a single one of its 8 SCSI drives died while it was running. the 2 hot-spares in raid were never used.

  17. Re:Keyboards? by The-Ixian · · Score: 3, Funny

    About once a year I pop all the keys off my keyboard and wipe everything down.

    One year I figured I would save time by just boiling the keys briefly instead of scrubbing each one by hand... that was a mistake.

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  18. kids stuff by TRRosen · · Score: 2

    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.

  19. This is Why Microsoft is Forcing Upgrades by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:This is Why Microsoft is Forcing Upgrades by iampiti · · Score: 2

      Very insightful. A pity I don't have mod points.
      Many companies have seen that customers are upgrading less and less often and have switched to a subscription model to keep the money flowing. An obvious case is Adobe. Ms themselves are also heavily pushing Office subscriptions over the regular purchase versions. With Windows 10 they've gone the Google model: Use your data to make money.

  20. Re:18 years is nothing by Phydeaux · · Score: 2

    I have a client running a Apple PowerMac 7200 (circa 1995), running MacOS 9.2.1 for a QuidProQuo webserver. Apart from a power outage 6 years ago (led to the purchase of a UPS for the system) it's been accessed almost daily during it's lifetime.

  21. I just upgraded my 486... by johnashtoncoleman · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

  22. 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?

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  23. Re:1991 Packard Bell 386SX/25 by Eluan · · Score: 2

    I've got a little trick that works on any old BIOS I've tried: just configure a hdd with the maximum allowed size in the bios prior to connecting the real hdd. Then it won't hang on autoconfigure/whatever and the maximum useable size will be used. I've done this trick on old 486/Pentium computers with 2gb/8gb limits and 80gb IDE drives which caused the BIOS to hang.