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Commodore C64 Survives Over 25 Years Balancing Drive Shafts In Auto Repair Shop (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: One common gripe in the twenty-first century is that nothing is built to last anymore. Even complex, expensive computers seem to have a relatively short shelf-life nowadays. However, one computer in a small auto repair shop in Gdansk, Poland has survived for the last twenty-five years against all odds. The computer in question here is a Commodore C64 that has been balancing driveshafts non-stop for a quarter of a century. The C64C looks like it would fit right in with a scene from Fallout 4 and has even survived a nasty flood. This Commodore 64 contains a few homemade aspects, however. The old computer uses a sinusoidal waveform generator and piezo vibration sensor in order to measure changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain or force by converting them to an electrical charge. The C64C interprets these signals to help balance the driveshafts in vehicles. The Commodore 64 (also known as the C64, C-64, C= 64) was released in January 1982 and still holds the title for being the best-selling computer of all time.
I don't know how the disks are still readable with all that dust.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How that thing is still running is a miracle.
Don't fscking touch it - which applies to code as well as tools.
...when things were built to last. I tried my C64 about two months ago, which had been collecting dust on a bin for over 20 years and it worked just like the day my parents got it for me. Including the datasette and 1541 disk drive.
The management of Commodore was pretty incompetent in the later years, but they always had top notch engineers. The C64 and the Amiga have lived far beyond many of the other computers from their eras, which is a testament to the engineers. The MOS 6581 (MOS was owned by Commodore) is still in high demand today because of its unique sound quality. As I understand it, the MOS 6581 was an unfinished product and was being designed to have far greater capability than what it ended up with. There's no substitute for great engineers who develop a great product, but so many businesses today do a half assed job with that. And that's why things don't last anymore.
But maybe not the oldest one!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Anybody remembers the TV ad song? I just came through my mind, it went like:
"I adore my sixty-four, my Commodore sixty-four"
Heck, I just googled for it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
do we know by how much would the phone next to it beat the C64 in terms of processing power ?
youth like it's a museum piece? Please?
...was managing the inventary of a bookstore here in Italy. I saw it about five years ago, and the bookstore was specialized in ancient books.
It was a really inspiring vision to see on the same desk a C64 surrounded by some in-folio books. Too bad that the store was shut down recently, don't know what happened to the C64.
youth like it's a museum piece? Please?
How about you fuck off until you learn the difference between the subject and contents??
One common gripe in the twenty-first century is that nothing is built to last anymore. Even complex, expensive computers seem to have a relatively short shelf-life nowadays. However, one computer in a small auto repair shop in Gdansk, Poland has survived for the last twenty-five years against all odds. visa my
Well old times things were not built to cheapest zhensen market special offer components. Om surprised our modern technology works as well at it does considering they use cheapest everything they can find on them... Vheapest capasitors, cheapest resistors, cheapest chips, cheapest pcb manufacturing.... And old Commodore64 pcb is not one of those moderns hey lets get little water on it and it corrodes away types...
As a huge Commodore nerd with far too many C64s and C128s and accessories in my house, this is the kind of story I need from Slashdot.
I recently dug out all my old 5¼-inch floppy disks and used my ZoomFloppy to try to image them to my PC. Sadly, many of them were stored in slightly damp conditions and now have some kind of mold or dirt on the disk surface. Gently wiping it off with isopropyl alcohol allowed me to read some of the disks, but others appear to be unrecoverable. Also, as the disks spin they transfer any residual dirt or mold to the drive head, so I need to clean the drive head constantly.
On the other hand, it's kind of amazing that they work at all after ~25 years sitting in my basement.
Sure it didn't last so long because well maintained.
A few survives long from everything. That does not prove reliability.
I dare to say that Amiga was a good decade ahead of its time when it was released. X86 machines took surprisingly long to catch up. It also had massive potential for future.
Yet it is gone. World could use one more major brand to keep the competition up..
I highly doubt C64 is the best-selling computer of all time. Wikipedia estimates 10M-17M C64s were sold. It of course depends on what is a computer: for example, many smartphones have CPU(s), memory, storage, and even display. According to this page, in 2011 Apple sold 72M iPhones: https://www.statista.com/stati... . Also, 10M Raspberry Pi computers were sold till 2016: https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl.... I guess Arduinos have similar numbers, but they are hard to track because of clones.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
But it is. Even 10 year old tech is museum-worthy in some cases. Computing ages on a severely compressed timescale.
Sometimes you get so used to thinking about things from 20 years ago as "ancient", that you're surprised the people involved are still alive and producing things.
Our local school has an Amiga running the HVAC in 9 schools
http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/
The worst part is you couldn't program C++ on the C65.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They can all thank this hard working machine.
I love how the three most battered/worn keys are "R" "U" and "N"
"Commodore C64 Survives Over 25 Years Balancing Drive Shafts In Auto Repair Shop"
I completely misunderstood this headline and thought it was literally balancing drive shafts, as in they were missing a cinder block that day, stuck a C64 under them instead, and they'd been sitting like that in the back for 25 years.
Still impressive I guess :)
And it's even more confusing given the message contents... an oldster who posts like a millennial?
PCs can and do last a long, long time. In my case, I have an old 486 from Compaq, '94 vintage, still up and running in my basement.
My Amstrad CPC6128 was way better than the C=64 !!
;-)
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Is the quality of the balancing compared to the modern equivalent device shops use. Is it still accurate after 25 years? Was it ever accurate or as accurate as a modern device can calculate?
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
While individuals under communism were extremely resourceful with the limited tools and materials they had on hand, they were inherently and perpetually limited due to central economic planning that failed to take into account individuality and limited access to real capital for research and development.
As my Romanian friends who escaped Ceacescu's regime always say: the reason communism doesn't work is because all people don't want to be equal to everyone else.
well it only have to be used once per boot and who sais that this machine has ever been turned off?
How probable do you think it is that they haven't had a power outage in 25 years?
And there goes entire periods of history with no permanent record, of technology or data.
You do realize that ALL of human history has huge gaps in the historical record right? Both for technology and for everything else. It's not as if our ancestors were busy dutifully scribbling down a carefully maintained record of everything they did. Our historical record has always had big swaths of information that nobody bothered to save for posterity. If anything with the internet we are actually recording more than we ever did in days of yore.
The computer in question here is a Commodore C64 that has been balancing driveshafts non-stop for a quarter of a century.
It's been running this program 24/7 for the last 25 years? Wow, this must be a really busy repair shop.
"Non-stop" in a computing context like this to mean "daily" is rather misleading, and a large factor on the reliability of the machine is whether they're shutting it down and starting it up every day. So it's a relevant complaint.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Still works just as well as it did the first day I turned it on in 1991.
(Actually better, since I upgraded it to have 4 HHDs, Picasso II+ gfxcard, 82MB RAM, and a 25Mhz 68040 accellerator..)
Perfectly suited for controlling my vast army of flying monkeys.
Back in the day, the Commodore 64 was often used for industrial applications like this where the cosmetics of having a trash computer were outweighed by the cost savings of using a common off-the-shelf piece of hardware that had a bunch of easily controlled digital I/O lines hanging out on a card edge connector on the back. In the late 80's I had a contract to write software to display weather radar on a C-64 screen where the resulting consoles were deployed on offshore oil rigs talking back to the homeland over 1200 baud radio modems. I also had a contract to do the heat and magnetic calibration on directional drilling probes, where the signals from the drilling probe went through an analog to digital converter and were then bit-banged in over the parallel port lines on a Commodore 64.
Today I'd probably use something like an Arduino for things like that. But that of course didn't exist back then.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I assume there is only one program on the disk.
On Dec 31, 1981 at 5:50 PM I bought the first C64 available for sale in my city. At the time I was a high school student in addition to working 40 hours per week in a retail store. I worked until 5:00 PM that day and I knew that if I didn't arrive before they closed I would have to wait at least 4 more days before the Commodore dealership was open again.
I had to drive across the city was actually stopped for speeding. When I told the cop the reason that I was in a rush he gave me the weirdest look and sent me off with a warning.
If my memory is correct I think I paid $1000 CAD for the computer and cassette drive. In 2016 dollars this would about 2700.00.
Communism worked well for some people with particular skills.
Good mechanics were in high demand. They did not make a fortune as the payments were usually bartered, but their life was definitely good.
Some other surprising professions were also living well.
Restaurant / pub guards, for one.
There was a special profession to scavenge all USSR for supplies for a factory or "kolkhoz". Imagine that you need to buy a plow for your Alabama-based farm or electronic components for your assembly line. Then you send someone off to Canada where, as rumoured, plows or capacitors or whatever may be produced and he might be able to obatain one. Or not. It needed social skill and good connections to do the job.
Wow. And to think, I was so proud of my IBM PS2 286, that is still running. ($2000in 1987).
Remember those old magazines where you got hexadecimal program listings you had to type in and run? That was a lot of fun!
I remember typing in a game - my sister read me the codes - then we played it.
Another time I typed in the LADS assembler listing and got into assembly language programming. I converted a BASIC program to assembler one time - that was very educational. It worked way faster after my conversion. (if you're curious, I converted a BASIC program that "squeezes" BASIC programs to make them use less memory) Such good memories. I have no such attachment to today's computers.