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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."
It is exactly what we should expect from solid state components. Demand no less!
...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.
It's not the solid-state components that I'm worried about. It's the capacitors in the power supply, and the mechanism in the floppy drive. Either this machine has regular maintenance (and several spare power supplies on hand), or it has an amulet of +20 Luck.
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.
youth like it's a museum piece? Please?
Don't fscking touch it - which applies to code as well as tools.
.
And if it breaks, throw it out?
What happened to this world?
It used to be a badge of honor to repair things. Now days everything is disposable.
Kind of like what happened to Slashdot.
You repair it when it it stops working, not while it's working. Seriously, read and comprehend the comment before going off on one.
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...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??
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...
Most electrical strain comes from power-on.
If the unit runs 24/7 (which there is little to no reason to think this system could not do), and the program read from the disk stays in memory the entire time (because the system is never turned off), then the mechanical parts in the drive wont wear down because they are only used when the program is initially loaded, and the capacitors in the PSU dont have much stress on them, because they dont get power cycled all the time.
Docent matter. They landed on moon with computing power less then even cheap chinese multifunction calculators are cabable... Just because its old, you dont throw it away... ;)
Sure it didn't last so long because well maintained.
Is that the two guys from the cell repair shop down the road? They do C64s too?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If it breaks, repair it. Hello? East bloc? Trust me, these guys know how to repair EVERYTHING.
I'm not kidding. I was on a bike tour around Europe. The only repair to my bike that lasted was done in Romania, with no fitting spare parts and tools from the stone age (ok, from the Soviet times, which is not that different). It was by some margin the cheapest repair, too.
I'd absolutely sure, if you happen to have a broken iPhone, they'll come with crowbars and arc welders and miraculously make it work again. WITHOUT any spare parts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Show me how you balance the drive shafts on the phone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Probably by a huge margin. I already had a C64 emulator in my phone about 5 years ago.
Even so , 8 bit machines were still built to a price - the components were hardly top of the range. I'd be amazed if its been running continuously for 25 years with no issues whatsoever. Also eastern europeans brought up in soviet times tend to be pretty good at repairing stuff for obvious reasons so I wouldn't be surprised if the are plenty of engineers around the area who could sort out the analogue electronics, even if the digital side would be too much.
The sinusoidal waveform generator may have more power than it, if it has a microcontroller and is not purely analog.
Trust me, the new generations don't really know how anymore.
ERROR 53
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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
Can't do a like-for-like comparison. I'd say somewhere around 100,000 times the speed (depending on task), and a similar order of magnitude for RAM.
I wouldn't be surprised if a TV repairman could sort that out too, at least at a coarse level. He'll at least understand the principle of electrical signals, and if a chip is dead, it's easy to replace.
This, power-on, spin-up and others are very quick ways to kill machines.
Case in point, I've ran a DELL machine constant for 12 years.
It never turned off. The HITACHI drive in it was from the start. 12 years.
I never knew modern-ish shit would last that long, especially with semi-heavy use, like occasional torrenting and "modern" web browsers that can write 20/40 gigs of data a day to a drive.
Thanks spyware and retarded session restore features. Couldn'ta done it without ye.
The one time I turn it off for a holiday, come back, it doesn't get past boot-screen.
DON'T TURN YOUR SHIT OFF. THAT'S HOW THEY GET YE!
Communism produces a more educated and efficient workforce. In technical fields, people were promoted and awarded very much according to merit. It is a shame politics were so corrupt, because after moving to the West I find most people are very ignorant and not willing to learn.
Maybe one day we shall have Communism again but with American style checks and balances.
I guarantee you that I can find a piece of paper older than 25 years quite easily. I probably have one in my attic.
I can find you a microscope and telescope even older.
Or if we're talking electronics, electronic games and games older than 25 years.
25 years is, to be honest, pathetic in terms of longevity. I have electronic toys from my childhood that haven't been particularly looked after which still work just fine.
To be honest, I'm sitting here thinking "Only 25 years?". I have a 1960's memory chip on my desk. It's the size of a dinner plate. If I had the room-sized supercomputer that went with it, I might even be able to tell you if it's working. I see no reason for it not to as it's in perfect condition and still in the original box.
25 years is really pathetic.
And how much tech has lasted that long? A handful of things across the world.
How much is going to last 50-100 years? Almost nothing.
And there goes entire periods of history with no permanent record, of technology or data.
To give you a clue, this memory chip only has the code C630-5150-T001 on it. Find me a spec sheet. A manufacturer. Tell me what it does or how to interface with it.
It's pretty, but it's completely dead technology without spending literally tens of thousands to analyse how it works and destroying it in the process.
Now consider what's going to happen to everything else by the time they are that old. It's only another 20 years that you're asking of this C64. By then, even the generation that grew up with it and now enjoy it on emulators will have started to forget about it, and certainly how it works. You think your grandchild's generation are going to care at all, even the archivists and museum curators?
Sending it to the moon isn't throwing it away?
those floppies are tough as nails. stuck one between the door, still worked. my floppies were all around the place, on the ground (being walk on, chairs put on them), continued to work. just got me some old c64 drives from storage somewhere for free, put a disk in them, it still works.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Communism produces a more ingenious, crafty workforce that can think outside the box, simply due to necessity because of shortages in materials and spare parts. People who could keep your plastic car running with shoestring and rubber band (provided that's available, if not, substitute) were highly sought after and could actually make a comfortable living for communist conditions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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/
To an extent you are correct, but for power supply capacitors in particular simply keeping the power on slowly wears them out. If you look at the datasheets for the capacitors used in power supplied (typically electrolytic), they give life expectancy with a given ripple current. The more ripple, the shorter their life will be.
For a consumer product with commonly available parts from the 80s, 8000 hours (~ 1 year) at the rated ripple is typical for a quality capacitor. They will have over-specified it, but even so 20+ years of 24/7 operation is definitely pushing it.
My guess is that they only turn the machine on when they need it. The software might be on ROM cartridge rather than disk. In any case, it's quite remarkable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - 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 :)
You typically can't have inefficient and sealed/unvented in the same design - that (usually) results in overheating and other such problems. Of course there are ways to pull heat out of a sealed product, but that's not the case with the C64.
Anyway, electrolytic capacitors always had a limited life span since the electrolyte in them doesn't last forever. I think the problem we see today is more the result of miniaturization - the energy density of capacitors has increased significantly and designers are building circuits with capacitances closer to design minimums to save space. This usually means fewer parallel capacitors in a design, each taking more abuse, and since many products ship with circuit capacitances already at design minimums, any capacitance losses due to degradation or environmental conditions quickly result in unstable circuits. This is especially true in power supplies which depend on high capacity and low ESR capacitors to ensure stability - this is best done with multiple large caps in parallel, but everyone wants their power bricks small, light, and cheap so corners are often cut.
(This is especially true on consumer grade kit where cheap and pretty are always more important than function and reliability).
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.
The original C64 black brick PSU was indeed sealed solid with epoxy and it got warm as hell during normal operation.
It's design was also very simple: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/schematics/computers/c64/c64extps.gif.
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?
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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
My 8-bit computer still works fine despite being stored in an Arizonan attic for 30 years where I would expect the temperatures to exceed 340K for extended periods of time.
'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' was one of the first lessons taught in engineering school.
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.
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The AGC was a 16bit computer with 64k of memory 2K RAM). My last calculator from about 15 years ago was 64 bits, ran at 4MHz and had 640kb memory.
I assume there is only one program on the disk.
Just to clarify, my point was that it couldn't be both sealed (via encapsulating in epoxy) and inefficient. Since it is sealed and has a limited capacity to continually dissipate heat, it must be somewhat efficient. The claim was that it's only 20 to 25% efficient, which means that at the maximum output on the 5V rail, the brick is dissipating over 100w. There is no fracking way that brick can dissipate anywhere near that much power - even at half of its rated output power, the brick would quickly become hot enough to melt plastic and burn flesh.
I guess I'm just being pedantic - as a guy who designs boxes and the PCBs that go in them, how much power I waste vs how I get that wasted power out of the box is a major part of any design.
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.
Despite the grime. If you leave the disk in, and use the drive it more or less keeps the internals clean. I had worked at factories, where the PC's have been running for decades, when I open them up the area where they are fans are grubby, however places where there is limited airflow they are like new.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
To give you a clue, this memory chip only has the code C630-5150-T001 on it. Find me a spec sheet. A manufacturer. Tell me what it does or how to interface with it.
It's pretty, but it's completely dead technology without spending literally tens of thousands to analyse how it works and destroying it in the process.
I have a Realistic Clarinette 119 from 1986 that still works, better yet, it includes a manual that has a full schematic printed in the back. I have a GE record player from the mid-1960s, complete with tube amplifier, also still works and includes the schematic printed inside the electronics access panel.
Now to your memory device--We're building more and more into single package ICs (both single and multiple chips inside)... it's just impractical to even consider providing functional data with the devices those parts are used in, let alone the parts themselves, and in many cases the data isn't even publicly published for competitive reasons. The semiconductor company I used to work for produced audio components, we had cryptic markings on the chip and produced an absolutely minimal data sheet (for public consumption) because the part wasn't available for low volumes and where the volumes made sense for us to sell, we hand-held companies on the designs. These products are all disposable, not only because it's impractical to repair or reuse, but because no manufacturer would want it due to reducing future sales. So of course durability is hardly a factor for most products.
Now consider just how little is being printed today? It's always fun (for me anyway) to find or read old newspapers--what was going on that day 50 years ago? In 50 years no one will have a clue what was posted to a news website on a particular day. You'll have to hope someone added it to Wiki or that whatever news conglomerate is running the news has a search history that goes back that far.
What about old pictures? We used to cherish them, buy special enclosures for them. Now we take a picture, upload it, and hope it stays somewhere. Maybe we print it, but the paper and inks are less durable. If you keep it digital after a few years you've moved on to the next storage as a service provider and your stuff may stick around, but it's effectively in a digital landfill unless you take care of it. Moving your digital stuff ought to be easier than your physical stuff, but if you put a photo album on a shelf for 20 years it will still be there as long as you don't move. What digital medium can you say the same about? Even CD/DVD degrades relatively quickly--and that's assuming you still have a reader... My Mac laptop hasn't had a CD drive in years.
Everything has become disposable, even our information.
I predict that in 100 years we'll have more persistent informational "artifacts" from 1950 then 2050 because we'll continue down our path of disposable information, people will give less and less concern to the gigabytes and terabytes of information they generate year after year.
/ end grandpa rant
Even so , 8 bit machines were still built to a price - the components were hardly top of the range. I'd be amazed if its been running continuously for 25 years with no issues whatsoever. Also eastern europeans brought up in soviet times tend to be pretty good at repairing stuff for obvious reasons so I wouldn't be surprised if the are plenty of engineers around the area who could sort out the analogue electronics, even if the digital side would be too much.
Doesn't sound like something they would spend big bucks on a person with an electrical engineering degree to maintain. I'm sure those guys have more lucrative activities to do with their skills. They probably just hire some regular electronics guy to do it instead.
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The capacitors are easy to replace. The chips are fat and happy NMOS that are somewhat static sensitive but otherwise pretty indestructible. The big problem with the chips is the 6526 CIA, which is the parallel port chip that is likely interfaced with the balancer machine. Those tend to pop if you stare at them wrong because the raw digital lines go directly from the CIA pins to that port on the back with no (zero) buffering, and it's been quite a while since they were manufactured. I used to pop them all the time when interfacing my wire-wrapped gadgets to my Commodore 64 and our local Commodore repair center knew me by name and when I came in the door immediately went in the back and got a 6526 out of his tubes of spares to sell to me. That was, of course, thirty years ago. Today they can still be found on eBay as pulls from recycled machines, but with the normal caveats of buying recycled components from eBay -- i.e.,. most of the time the seller has no way of testing them, so what you get may or may not work.
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I would use an Arduino board with a Bluetooth adapter to do all the grunt work, and use the (Android) smartphone just for the user interface, talking to the Arduino via a Serial profile. We do something like that in ham radio nowadays to interface APRS with Android tablets, with the Android tablet providing GPS coordinates to be outputted as ham radio packets to the APRS system, and accepting GPS coordinates sent via packet radio from the ham-radio-interfaced Arduino to display the call signs of surrounding ham radio stations on the Android tablet's display . (Can't do it with iDevices because Apple won't open up access to the Serial profile).
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I still have most of the Commodore 64 code that I ever wrote, even though the computers are sitting in my brother's attic 2,000 miles from here and the disks are long gone. As I've upgraded platforms I've pulled in my files from the previous platforms, and now we have emulators so I could even run the programs again if I wished. This obviously isn't going to help with things that had a hardware component like my card for interfacing a Commodore 64 with a 1571 disk drive at full 1571 speed (wire-wrapped, naturally, and using a ROM simulator SRAM chip to hold my code), but (shrug). The whole need for that is really not there anymore since a simulated 1541 is ridiculously faster than the real thing was.
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You repair it when it it stops working, not while it's working. Seriously, read and comprehend the comment before going off on one.
Ooh, let me guess... You are from the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' school of thought?
Congratulations, precious snow flake.
For reference, in my days, you would actually maintain things so they didn't break...
Yeah, maintenance is different to repair, that's why they have two completely separate words.
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Wow. And to think, I was so proud of my IBM PS2 286, that is still running. ($2000in 1987).
More ingenious than the system that gave us the Commodore 64 in the first place?