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.

Comments

dust

[phantomfive]

I don't know how the disks are still readable with all that dust.

Re:dust

[Hognoxious]

Disks? It probably uses cassettes!

Re:dust

[phantomfive]

There's a 1541-II right there on the desk with it. Newer model Commodore 64-C. I can still smell it.

Re:dust

[Lisandro]

The 1541-II was (is) surprisingly rugged. It didn't have the overheat and head alignment issues that plagued the original 1541.

Re:dust

[phantomfive]

The 1541 floppies were definitely not as sensitive as later 3 1/2 floppies (which got corrupted if you looked at them funny), but they weren't invincible, dust and fingerprints could still cause problems.

Re:dust

[nicomede]

I still have the pinch I used to make these floppies double sided cutting the notch on the side. When I explained my daughters what this was for, they looked at me like if I just explained them how I squashed rocks to make fire...

Re:dust

[Lisandro]

Hell, i've recently explained the concept of "dial up" to a millennial. Got the exact same reaction in response.

Re:dust

[ravenshrike]

Pity, much more amusing to imagine a miniature Axel Foley glued to the head shouting encouragement.

Re:dust

[Mashiki]

That likely wasn't soot from exhaust, it was brake dust. Automotive exhaust unless it's diesel has a very low soot footprint, you're talking 20 PPM or less in counts even back in the 90's. I was an apprentice in the 90's when the switch over from non-metallic aka full asbestos to semi-metallic happened. And you'd find that shit everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. The vic20 we used for alignments was full of it, it would get into tool cabinets, into air lines if they'd been hug for a while, it would even clog your compressor air-intake. Exhaust was almost always vented outside(or with the doors opens) since you have a CO hazard in enclosed spaces.

Until the real dangers of asbestos were known, simply knocking the brakes loose was the standard practice even into the late 90's. Meaning when you broke them loose you were kicking asbestos and other particulate into the air, and of course breathing it in. Then we started spraying down the drums and rotors to mitigate the dust problem. I go for chest x-rays every 3-4 years to check for mesothelioma and for good reasons.

Re: dust

[Dunbal]

You've never heard of isopropol alcohol?

No, and neither have you. Isopropyl alcohol on the other hand...

Re:dust

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh dude? Yeah did you not see where this C64 is? Wanna guess what the main vehicle was before the wall fell in that area of the world? A little hunk of shit known as the Trabant which was a 2 stroke smoke generator.

Remember friend it was an area controlled by Soviet Russia, where soot generates YOU!

Re:dust

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most millennials would have had dial-up if they had internet in their household when they were growing up. We really need a different term for the folks born post 1990. I figure by the strict definition that I'm a millennial but I started with 28.8 and later 36.6k and playing the 3 Stooges Game on a Commodore Amiga and reader rabbit off 5.25" floppy disks on a 486 system.

Re:dust

[pslytely psycho]

Hehehe, yeah, taking that concept back a few years to 1999, my (at the time) 11 year old son and I were playing the game Driver that had just come out.
I got the same reaction from him during a cutscene that showed Tanner using a rotary phone. I had to explain what he was doing as my son had never seen one before.
After that I'm certain he believes we made fire with sticks and wrote on clay tablets in school.

Re:dust

[David_Hart]

I repaired a PC that was primarily used in an automotive repair facility. That's not dust. It's soot from the exhaust. Unsurprisingly, the CD-ROM drive in the machine that I was repairing was nonfunctional because the lens was dirty.

You're right, though. I have no idea how that floppy drive is still operational after 30+ years.

I used to work for an oil company. It takes less than a year for a computer to go from shiny new to looking like this. Even less time in a garage. The biggest problem isn't brake dust or exhaust but the combination of those plus oil and grease from mechanics. The grease and oil gets on the case and then everything else just sticks and builds up layers.

Re:dust

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well, the shrieking of a 1541 going dead could hit the same high notes as Axel Rose...

Re:dust

[Scarletdown]

I used razor blades. But yeah, I could probably eyeball it without flipping another one over for reference...

No need for that when a paper punch works just as well. All you had to do was place a second floppy face down over the one you wanted to notch and use its notch as the guide for making your punch.

I remember some derpy kid here in my little home town trying to claim that notching your single sided disks to make them double sided was illegal and that the overpriced disk notchers were also illegal. I wonder if he was related to the sales rep at Western Auto who tried to convince my dad that the viertical turntables they were pushing had a truer sound than traditional record players, because allegedly records were recorded on vertical turntables. That of course set off his bullshit meter, and although he humored the guy, he did not believe a word of it.

Re:dust

[jrmcferren]

The interface to the balancing system would be mounted in the expansion (cartridge) port (direct bus access) or the user port (Serial at TTL level as well as parallel of some kind).

Re:Floppy drive

[cfalcon]

It is exactly what we should expect from solid state components. Demand no less!

Ahh, the good ole' days...

[Lisandro]

...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.

Commodore engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Commodore engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

6581 is semi analogue, it wouldn't be at all the same built on a different process.

Re:Commodore engineers

[F.Ultra]

No that was not why they died. The whole management was corrupt and Irving Gould used the company as his personal check book.

Re:Commodore engineers

[Shinobi]

Not just Irving Gould. Ali Mehdi was just as greedy personally, and penny-pinching in running the company. When engineers proposed the A3000 with a 68030, he personally called them up to ask whether the 68030 was truly necessary, if there weren't cheaper components that could be used

Re:Commodore engineers

[squiggleslash]

That works/worked* in the car industry where a car that's twenty five years old isn't typically much less advanced than one twenty years old. But in our industry?

Commodore's problem was more that they took an age to substantially improve the Amiga and make those improvements available. The A500 was more or less an A1000 in a keyboard case and was still being sold as one of TWO Amiga models five years later. And the A2000, the other model, wasn't more powerful than the A1000 (or A500), it was just more expandable. In the same year they finally relented and released the A3000, a 32 bit Amiga, but priced it way out of consideration for most people.

None of this was the engineers' fault it should be pointed out. While it took a while to come up with a better base chipset to replace OCS/ECS, the engineers were still belting out some fantastic designs, most of which were squished by upper management. Commodore Management's response to the increasing obsolescence of their low end model wasn't to replace it with something better, it was to replace it, at the same price, with the A600, a machine that was worse in almost every respect (well, it did have an IDE interface...), and which had been designed as a replacement for the Commodore 64.

Had the A3000 replaced the A2000 in 1990, with a similar upgrade given to the A500, I think Commodore might have stood a chance.

* OK, there's a reason I put 20 years there and "worked" - the car industry is genuinely going through a development phase which is nice to see.

Re:Commodore engineers

[Danathar]

Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali can both rot in h*ll as far as I am concerned. I will NEVER forget those names. They took a company that had a successful product and great engineers and squeezed it for every last penny purposely skimping on re-investment and new products for the express purpose of greed.

Re:Commodore engineers

[drinkypoo]

The A500 was more or less an A1000 in a keyboard case and was still being sold as one of TWO Amiga models five years later.

Twice the RAM, twice the RAM expansion, kickstarter in ROM... At least it had meaningful differences.

And the A2000, the other model, wasn't more powerful than the A1000 (or A500), it was just more expandable.

Now that's true. The A500 really is just an A2000 with a video connector and more slots.

Re:Commodore engineers

[Jeremi]

While it took a while to come up with a better base chipset to replace OCS/ECS, the engineers were still belting out some fantastic designs, most of which were squished by upper management.

The above was a really good case study in business ecosystem dynamics.

When the Amiga 1000 came out, it was alien technology -- probably 10 years ahead of its time. The Amiga OCS chipset's graphics and sound hardware of its contemporary competitors look like historical artifacts, and it's OS was an actual pre-emptive multitasking operating system, not just a glorified disk loader.

However, any company in the world could design, build, and sell a new PC sound card or a new PC graphics card, any many of them did. The PC sound and graphics cards continued to suck (relative to the Amiga) for quite a while, but simply due to the fact that so many different companies had hired so many engineers to work on developing them, they improved every year, and eventually surpassed the capabilities of the Amiga sometime in the mid-90's.

Amiga's engineers were undoubtedly some of the most talented on the planet, but their small team eventually couldn't compete with the sheer numbers of PC-based engineers. By the time AGA came out, the writing was on the wall: An open system that gains traction will eventually outgrow and out-innovate a small, closed system, no matter how awesome the skills of the closed systems' engineers.

Re:Commodore engineers

[thinkwaitfast]

Jay Miner was one of my idols.

Re:Commodore engineers

[jcfandino]

I found these two videos about Jack Tramiel and the history of Commodore very interesting:
Part 1
Part 2

Re:Floppy drive

[freeze128]

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.

Can you please not talk about the computer of my

[Anonymous Coward]

youth like it's a museum piece? Please?

Re: If it works

[stealth_finger]

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.

The last C64 I saw...

[ctrl-alt-canc]

...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.

Re:Floppy drive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: If it works

[Opportunist]

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.

Re: If it works

[Ash-Fox]

Hello? East bloc? Trust me, these guys know how to repair EVERYTHING.

Trust me, the new generations don't really know how anymore.

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.

ERROR 53

Best selling computer?

[Yenya]

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.

Re:Best selling computer?

[wildstoo]

Yes, but not the same exact model, that's what the 64 managed. It was the same machine sold for a decade.

THIS. It is the biggest selling single model of computer ever made. There were several hardware revisions for cost reduction and simplification (from ~40 chips down to 16 as they integrated a lot of components over time), but it was essentially exactly the same computer manufactured and sold from 1982 to 1992.

Re:Best selling computer?

[Neo-Rio-101]

It's because Apple keeps messing with the operating system on iPhones that it doesn't really qualify (and nor does it come with a keyboard)

The C64 had the same BASIC and KERNAL ROMs for the entire production run, meaning that each revision of the hardware was equally 100% compatible with any other C64.

You can't really say that for most computer lines. Take the Atari 8-bit line, the Apple II series, or the Commodore Amigas..... All different revisions of essentially the same computer in different memory, kernel, and language configurations. Oftentimes the different cases prevented certain expansions from working correctly, but not the C64.

Sure there was the C64 breadbin and C64C cases, and yes there were motherboard revisions of the circuitry including some sound and CPU chip revisions which were different yet otherwise 100% compatible... but other than that the Commodore 64 was a consistant platform for it's entire decade-long production run. Perhaps because of that, it held it's own defacto standard to which all demo coders could pitch towards in the demo scene. They weren't shit-fighting over using different hardware chips or memory expansions as the Amiga demoscene had to put up with. Most demos (with some notable exceptions) all used the stock hardware with a 1541 disk drive.... and that was it, and those were the rules that everyone understood (and still understands)

For that reason the demoscene on the C64 has stayed more or less constant too, and hasn't died like the other demo scenes.

Re: If it works

[Opportunist]

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.

Another 'oldie' but goodie

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Programming language

[Oswald McWeany]

The worst part is you couldn't program C++ on the C65.

Re:Programming language

[lefticus]

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

What I would like to see...

[Not-a-Neg]

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?

Utter nonsense

[StandardCell]

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.

Re:My God, clean it sometimes!

[Jeremi]

It would be a bad idea to clean it now -- at this point the dirt is its primary structural element.