20-Yr-Old Compaq Laptop Is Still Crucial to Maintaining McLaren's Multi-Million Dollar Cars (jalopnik.com)

An anonymous reader writes: It may come as a surprise to many, but the 20-year-old Compaq LTE 5280 still plays a vital role in maintaining multi-million dollar McLaren F1s. Jalopnik recently visited McLaren's Special Operations workshop where it found several of Compaq's old laptops serving their masters. Why do they rely on these dated computers, you ask? A McLaren Special Operations staff explains, "The reason we need those specific Compaq laptops is that they run a bespoke CA card which is installed into them. The CA card is an interface between the laptop software (which is DOS based) and the car. We are currently working on a new interface which will be compatible with modern laptops as the old Compaqs are getting less and less reliable and harder to find." For those wondering, the Compaq LTE 5280 comes with a 120MHz Intel Pentium processor, up to "80MB" of RAM, and up to 1.2GB of HDD.

Comments

Faster Laptop

[OrangeTide]

It's not like a faster laptop would make the car run faster. In the end it only becomes an issue when there is a need to replace diagnostics equipment and there aren't enough spares.

I suspect a bit of hardware and software effort could port the interface and stack to an Arduino and then you could access it from a phone or tablet for another 20 years. But the pragmatic part of me wouldn't want to why something unless it's broken.

Re:Faster Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

It's broken because it uses 20 year old non-manufactured hardware.

This is just bullshit consumerist ideology.
The hardware still works, and will continue to work until the day it dies.
Do banks change their hardware software infrastructure every 5/10 years because old hardware is broken according to you even though it functions perfectly ? Old is not synonym for broken.

Old saying applies here

[theGhostPony]

If it aint broke, don't fix it.

Systematically distortion of product demography

[dpbsmith]

Because it is beneficial to almost everyone in the industry to believe that "everybody" uses only the newest gear, there is a systematic distortion of the facts of what might be called "product demography." I've seen this everywhere I've worked, including several years at a (long-gone) Fortune 500 computer company.

It seems that almost everyone relies on 15 and 20-year old equipment. Everyone scratches their head in amazement at what's in the back of the server room and the unbelievable story of why it is still in service--but it is there.

I've had several conversations with people at the computer company that went about like this.
"We don't need to support that model, it's too old, nobody is using it."
"I think a lot of people are still using it."
"Why do you think that?"
"For one reason, because we still use it ourselves."
"WHAAAAT?"
"Sure. Check with Lewis on the 4th floor of building III. They have three of them."
"What on earth for?"
"Because of [reasons X, Y, and Z]. And they can't get rid of them because the new models [have problems Q, R, and S].
"Oh, well, that's a completely unique situation. Nobody else in the world is using them."
"Trust me, if we're using them our customers are using them. Unless you believe that everyone else in the world is better managed and more up-to-date than we are."

Pretty misleading

[wicka_wicka]

It's a 20-year-old laptop being used to service a 20-year-old car. I don't find this very strange. It's not like any current McLarens still require the same laptop.

Re:Not entirely a unique situation.

[Solandri]

My uncle's print shop has an old transparency film printer from the early 1990s. Its manufacturer went bankrupt shortly after its release, and the only drivers available for it are for Mac OS 6 and Windows 3.1, and when I tried to pull the drivers off the floppies I found that the first floppy was no longer readable. So the only backkup they have is an image of the working HDD.

It's a small shop - he handles the client contacts, one employee does the graphics prep work, and another employee does the physical silkscreen printing from the film onto the final medium (poster, t-shirt, banner, whatever). He says he can't afford the ~$15k a new film printer would cost. So he has two 1990-era Mac Quadras with the print drivers installed. (One is a replacement they bought off eBay in a panic when the original failed. It turned out the failure was due to bad RAM, so after I moved the RAM from the eBay computer to the original, it worked again. They keep the eBay one as insurance against future hardware failures.) They're connected to his ethernet network, and a modern Mac (where they do the layout and prep work) sends the print job to the Quadra, which sends it to the printer.

They things are so old one of the support calls I got was to fix a broken power button. It turned out the Quadra's power button is mounted at the end of a piece of plastic, and the plastic acts like a spring. Well, after 20 years, the plastic had turned brittle with age and snapped off, and the power button had fallen inside the case. I had to jerry rig a replacement spring with some new plastic and epoxy to get it working again. Another call was that the printer had suddenly stopped working. I opened it up and... you don't want to know what 20 years of dust buildup looks like. Fortunately there was a filter keeping the dust out of the film's print path. But the fan was completely clogged and the thing was overheating.