What's the Hardiest Hardware You've Seen?

mrsev asks: "I work in a lab and so have lots of strange equipment around me. Recently I found an old 256Mb USB Flash Disk, that I had been looking for 6 months. This would not be amazing but for the fact that it was frozen in a block of ice in one of our -80C freezers (-112F). It must have fallen from my top pocket when I was reaching in. After chiping it out and a quick thaw and dry ... it worked!! All my data was intact and there were no problems. I am now looking for a victim to test in our liquid nitrogen storage facility. My question is what is the strangest hardware survival you have seen."

Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s

[Rick the Red]

See it here [classic-audio.com].

Memory and low temperatures

[Tiersten]

Low temperatures actually improves data retention in SRAM when it's unpowered, I know it's not Flash but they both do rely on storing charge.

The fact crazy people have previously immersed their PC in liquid nitrogen and still had a functional PC at the end shows that it shouldn't damage most electronics.

So assuming the low temperature didn't crack the PCB or chip leads and the moisture didn't short anything then it's not too surprising that it survived.

Re:Panasonic Toughbook CF-28

[platipusrc]

You might be able to find what you're looking for on this pages's semi-rugged laptops [discountlaptops.com]. There are laptops from the Panasonic ToughBook CF sereis on there.

Re:Panasonic Toughbook CF-28

[drix]

You can [discountlaptops.com] buy them retail. The markup isn't really even that hefty compared to an "untough" system. Best of all, that particular reseller will bundle Linux/no-OS with their systems.

Re:HP Calculators

[Trbmxfz]

Good point. I too have a HP that fell from 5-6 feet on concrete on several occasions. The case gets a few scratches every time, but that's it. I saw other people's HP survive some bad treatment too. After all, these are the calculators that engineers take to space (traditionally)!

I hear that newer models (those with the funky colors) are much weaker. There are reports of them falling from two feet on a carpet and having their screen destroyed.

Re:HP Calculators

[Trbmxfz]

Some people may have a different opinion: Dead 49G [hpcalc.org].

Re:Two unrelated ones

[crass751]

My dad is still using the original keyboard from his 1991 Gateway 2000. The thing is a brick.

IBM 3812 Line Printer

[slaker]

I don't know how much they weigh - easily 100lbs. - but one of my customers had an old 3812 line printer that he wanted to get rid of, on the grounds that no one printed from his AS/400 any more.

Fair enough.

I was working alone that day, and the dollies were all locked up, so I ended up carrying it out to the loading dock. It was unbelievably bulky and awkward, and by the time I got to the edge of the dock closest to the dumpster, my hards were all sweaty. It slipped right out of my hands, straight down between the dumpster and the dock, probably 8 feet all told, and onto concrete. It went "CLANG", and I could tell it was the printer that was ringing, not the dumpster.

The dumpster was almost as tall as I am. I knew I wasn't going to be able to safely lift it up over my head by myself.

So I put it in my car, figuring I could just set it out with my trash.

When I got home I noticed the thing had a 5.25" floppy drive in it, and the worst thing I could say about it was that it looked scuffed from its close encounter with the ground. It didn't have a parallel port, but it did have a DB9, token ring and twinax interfaces.

I hauled it out of my car and under my garage workbench, plugged it in and ran a modem cable to it from my workbench PC. Added some paper...

OK. It didn't print.

But it WANTED to. There just wasn't any toner in it. I snagged a toner and a fuser kit for it from my client the next time I visited, fed it to my printer and...

It's a line printer. It doesn't do fonts or any other stupid crap. But it prints text at an amazing 12 pages per minute, probably faster if I had it hooked up through token ring. Perfect for big jobs, like printing out man pages and email and stuff.

My other IBM example? I stepped on a T20 a couple years back. The keyboard, not the display, fortunately. Some keys came off. I put them back on, everything was fine.

Ye gads did IBM overbuild their hardware.

Not really "durable" in a classic sense, but one of my clients also has a Netware 3 machine with just over 3000 days of uptime, an ancient Zeos machine with 4 2GB SCSI disks and UPS that's probably been dead five years, that a half-dozen Windows 3.1 machines still connect to and use every day.