1. The INOVA X5 flashlight (first version, no moving parts save the head, which you turn to turn on the lights) is incredibly durable, people always asked about it and I always said that yes, you could run it over with a car and it would still work fine, you could drop it and it wouldn't matter. Eventually someone called my bluff, so I had this guy throw it into the air and not catch it out in the parking lot. Flashlight is fine, concrete slightly scuffed.
2. Texas Instruments TI-99 4A. I got one for $2.50 at a garage sale, it had done time in a leaky attic, tons of rust and corrosion on any exposed contacts. hooked it up, turned on the TV, plugged in Munch Man and it ran great.
3. There was a Mac Peforma 6360 at a Mac store where I once worked. The office it was in caught fire somehow and the computer's case was mostly burned to a crisp. The monitor died, the Mac looked like hell and the plastic casing sealed off the floppy and CD-ROM drives. But it still runs! The data was saved and the Mac was kept as a proof of those old machines' durability. I figure it lived because it has the metal chassis to hold everything together inside, a metal case around that to keep the radiation in, and then another tough beige plastic shell outside that.
4. Original iPod. My friend has two original 5GB iPods, both of which are (as are all iPods after a day or so) rather badly scratched. They've both been dropped on a variety of surfaces, had water spilled on them, and one has been taken apart completely after the mechanical scroll wheel died. The way to fix the scroll wheels, apparently, is to press very hard and turn it a lot, this seemed to clean the contacts 1n this one iPod.
5. My ghetto Mac. The board and CPU come from a beige G3 tower that was dropped from a considerable height. The case was so badly damaged that it was held together with packing tape when I bought it (for a very good price). There was no heat sink on the 300Mhz CPU so I had to find one, and being a total n00b back in the day I went to the Shack. That was $28 that ended up snapping the plastic ZIF socket. Krazy Glue to the rescue. The case was salvaged from a PC store, it had been taken to pieces and is really just a frame to hold all the parts, having no side or top panels. This machine has taken a LOT of abuse, because back in the day I didn't know how to configure IDE hard drives so everything spent a lot of time being plugged into the wrong busses in the wrong order. I forgot to plug the VRM in a few times, and the RAM chips always had a different speed for each of them. It's been unplugged, power surged, dropped, had things dropped on it, the power supply has been overloaded and shorted out twice, and it's even electrocuted me. I killed it (totally dead, no boot, won't see drives, etc.) and then brought it back three or four times so far. It's still a work in progress, and I've been slowly adding features and stickers and shiny things (EL cable, rounded IDE cables, giant Mercedes star taken from a junkyard, etc.) and now, with a better video card, two monitors, awesome Yamaha speakers, a FireWire/USB card, an Apple Pro Keyboard, a Microsoft optical trackball, a combo drive and a way-overkill 80GB/8MB hard drive as well as a 6GB startup drive, it's still my main machine, over three years later. Runs 10.2.8 fast enough, though it crashes more often than it should. Insanely durable though, and I'm surprised that such an ancient machine (1997-8 or so) can actually run the newest OS and peripherals without any serious problems or conflicts.
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Hey, a few things to add to the list:
1. The INOVA X5 flashlight (first version, no moving parts save the head, which you turn to turn on the lights) is incredibly durable, people always asked about it and I always said that yes, you could run it over with a car and it would still work fine, you could drop it and it wouldn't matter. Eventually someone called my bluff, so I had this guy throw it into the air and not catch it out in the parking lot. Flashlight is fine, concrete slightly scuffed.
2. Texas Instruments TI-99 4A. I got one for $2.50 at a garage sale, it had done time in a leaky attic, tons of rust and corrosion on any exposed contacts. hooked it up, turned on the TV, plugged in Munch Man and it ran great.
3. There was a Mac Peforma 6360 at a Mac store where I once worked. The office it was in caught fire somehow and the computer's case was mostly burned to a crisp. The monitor died, the Mac looked like hell and the plastic casing sealed off the floppy and CD-ROM drives. But it still runs! The data was saved and the Mac was kept as a proof of those old machines' durability. I figure it lived because it has the metal chassis to hold everything together inside, a metal case around that to keep the radiation in, and then another tough beige plastic shell outside that.
4. Original iPod. My friend has two original 5GB iPods, both of which are (as are all iPods after a day or so) rather badly scratched. They've both been dropped on a variety of surfaces, had water spilled on them, and one has been taken apart completely after the mechanical scroll wheel died. The way to fix the scroll wheels, apparently, is to press very hard and turn it a lot, this seemed to clean the contacts 1n this one iPod.
5. My ghetto Mac. The board and CPU come from a beige G3 tower that was dropped from a considerable height. The case was so badly damaged that it was held together with packing tape when I bought it (for a very good price). There was no heat sink on the 300Mhz CPU so I had to find one, and being a total n00b back in the day I went to the Shack. That was $28 that ended up snapping the plastic ZIF socket. Krazy Glue to the rescue. The case was salvaged from a PC store, it had been taken to pieces and is really just a frame to hold all the parts, having no side or top panels. This machine has taken a LOT of abuse, because back in the day I didn't know how to configure IDE hard drives so everything spent a lot of time being plugged into the wrong busses in the wrong order. I forgot to plug the VRM in a few times, and the RAM chips always had a different speed for each of them. It's been unplugged, power surged, dropped, had things dropped on it, the power supply has been overloaded and shorted out twice, and it's even electrocuted me. I killed it (totally dead, no boot, won't see drives, etc.) and then brought it back three or four times so far. It's still a work in progress, and I've been slowly adding features and stickers and shiny things (EL cable, rounded IDE cables, giant Mercedes star taken from a junkyard, etc.) and now, with a better video card, two monitors, awesome Yamaha speakers, a FireWire/USB card, an Apple Pro Keyboard, a Microsoft optical trackball, a combo drive and a way-overkill 80GB/8MB hard drive as well as a 6GB startup drive, it's still my main machine, over three years later. Runs 10.2.8 fast enough, though it crashes more often than it should. Insanely durable though, and I'm surprised that such an ancient machine (1997-8 or so) can actually run the newest OS and peripherals without any serious problems or conflicts.