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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.
I have worked with organizations that used similarly old stuff and would buy stacks of replacements. The problem was that nearly all the replacements were failing in the same way before any use. Some glue that was fine for 10 years would suddenly start to run and dissolve other important bits. Certain bits would just corrode even thought they had been kept in a pretty damn good environment. LCD screens looked like something like bacteria were growing inside as some strange chemical process crept along.
One other magical thing is that it seems that if you don't use a hard drive for years that it will spin up, work fine for a very short while and then fail very rapidly. Probably some lubricant just dried up or mutated.
I feel their pain.
In a previous life, I did the end-user computing environment for a large healthcare company. At one facility we had a PC running a pneumatic tube system. The tube system controller card was full-length ISA. That machine was getting upgraded....never.
I'm sure a dozens of us have have similar stories -- old fax cards come to mind.