What's the Hardiest Hardware You've Seen? 247
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."
Tough CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Panasonic Toughbook CF-28 (Score:2, Interesting)
I used one of these things while out in the field for a utility company doing GPS mapping. I threw the thing on the floor of my truck, accidentally dropped it a few times, and accidentally left it on top of my truck in the rain.
Everytime I pushed the power button the thing ran perfectly, regardless of the fact it was running 98SE. I wish I could buy one of those things on the open market, I love the damn things.
G3 Wallstreet (Score:2, Interesting)
I once aquired a G3 wallstreet. It'd been left in the trunk for several months. There was no carpet, it was diurty, and the guy lived in an area with lots of pot holes.
When I get it it had nearly no paint on the bottom, and the top was scratched all to hell. but, it worked. LCD was in good shape, and it worked for a few months until I had passed it on to someone else.
Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:5, Interesting)
down a long flight of concrete stairs...
it bounced all the way to the bottom.
It survived with all data intact, :)
God bless Apple's case designers.
IBM Thinkpad laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
The verdict? A nackered case, a flickery LCD, but a perfect, no badcluster HDD and it still works perfectly.
Re:Memory and low temperatures (Score:2, Interesting)
on topic: my chain smoking brother has an old celeron thingy, the screen and case look yellow and the keyboard is a haggered piece of sh!t. last time i opened the case there was cloud of dust and the whole thing was covered in a thick layer of dust... truly disgusting.
Diamond Viper Z200 (Savage 2000) (Score:4, Interesting)
Vintage Macs (Score:4, Interesting)
Amiga Floppy (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, we had contacts on both sides of the pond - and when Commodore Australia wouldn't give us the brand new 1.1 release of the boot disk, we contacted the US office and got one sent out to us. It came by courier late in the day, in the middle of winter. Indeed, I was just going home. I grabbed the disk, thinking that I'd take it home and test it out there. So I grabbed my stuff, got into the car, and drove home. Grabbed a drink, and promptly forgot about it.
Next morning, I got up (at a loverly -4C
Worked. Beutifully. A quick backup or 10 and we were happy. Indeed, that became a mascot disk at the place for a while, and worked for ages.
Ahh memories
USB 256 drive that should have been dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
I had it in my shorts, I hit the pool. Still did not know it was in my short, threw them in the wash. Then the drier.
Found the damn thing when I was folding my shorts the next day, with water on the inside of it. Set it up on desk at work for about 3 days and pluged it in as it had the only known good copy of some offsite routers. Took a couple seconds and wamo there is my data, pull it off to the desktop. Reach down and find the little bugger all fogged up on the inside. 2 weeks on my desk for a real long term dry out and that damn thing still works like a charm.
Go figre....
AT&T Merlin PBX (Score:3, Interesting)
The day after the construction started (two days after the students left for the summer), we walked in to the building to find to our horror what looked like a war-zone. The cielings had been removed with a sledgehammer. Bits of drywall everywhere. The network and phone wires were hanging, supporting the old lighting fixtures. We knew then that the network cabling was garbage, and removed it all, but kept the phone system, thinking that if the new system was delayed, the offices would still have their old phones.
The summer passed. Lots of bad stuff happened in the building aside from that first day. Long story short, we were able to tie up the old phone lines. Only one had been broken. It's the day before school opens, and the new phones aren't installed yet - thank God we saved the old system. We go to plug in the controller for the PBX, and are greeted with a sound not unlike a gunshot, as flames lept out of the cabinet and power supply. (My guess is that the noise came from the surge surpressor which recoiled several feet as a result of the large bang, and was smoldering).
Fearing the worst, we replace the surge supressor, grab an extension cord, and try another outlet. Lo and behold, the phones work perfectly (one line had a bit of static on it). School opened without a hitch.
Also during that project, we had our T1 DSUs/CSUs nearly destroyed. We were never told that the concrete wall they were mounted on was having several holes cut in it for HVAC. We arrive to find our equipment buried in bits of concrete and a large hole directly above the board (a sledgehammer was used). Amazingly, after being shaken out, they too worked fine.
DJ's Dropping Laptops (Score:3, Interesting)
Matmos setup their laptops in the DJ both - a pair of Powerbooks they just laid them on top of the turntable platters. Anyway they DJ'd anyway in their own fashion until someone accidently hit the start button on the Turntable and the laptop crashed to the concrete floor.
And it kept playing without a glitch, they picked it up, checked the connections and then continued with their set.
Maybe not the toughest hardware, but a pretty spectacular demonstration of real world survivability.
Baked laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
You know where this is going...
He came back after the trip and thought he'd make himself a pizza. So he pre-heated the oven to 400F. After the smoke cleared, he took the laptop out and threw it out in the snow and left it there for a good while for it to cool down.
The top of the lid was mostly melted away and had fused with the bottom half. He had to crack it open. Surprisingly the LCD worked, the machine booted up. It still works to this date. Unfortunately Compaq didn't think it was good enough to advertise the ruggedness of his machine and so they turned down his offer.
HP laser printers and servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Old PPC Motherboard (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually improved a system through abuse!
I have this old Motorola PPC PReP motherboard I use for a fileserver. It had stopped autobooting, but would still boot if I manually typed the boot command on the console.
One day I was playing with it and managed to plug in the power leads wrong (AT power supply :-(). When I turned on the switch and the fans just sort of twitched I instantly realized what I had done.
I plugged them in correctly and turned it on and it still worked!. All of the NVRAM had been erased, but once I re-entered all of the configuration (and guessed at a few values since I don't have a manual) it started auto-booting again.
I have also seen chips meant for 3.3V power run for weeks on 5V power before anyone noticed. Some chips are really tuff.
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:5, Interesting)
A vacuumed SRAM that ended up in a computer (Score:2, Interesting)
A funny thing about my TRS-80, something different from any other one you've ever seen, is that when you first turned it on, you would only see funny characters on the screen. I mean things like a circle with a dot in it, or a greek letter... that kind of stuff. Then the characters would slowly start to flicker, and then you could see that they were trying to be regular characters, and then they were mostly regular characters with just a faint image of the funny character, and then finally, a minute later, the regular characters you expected were on the screen, the funny characters having faded to black. It was really a neat effect, but not one I got on purpose. What happened is that I had hacked an extra memory chip into the video memory to get upper and lowercase. To save money, the designers had put only seven bits of memory into the video memory (seven chips, each one having 1024 bits), and what they gave up was lowercase and special characters (they could have kept lowercase and special characters, but instead allowed graphics with some really bit pixels). But the character encoder that turned the video memory bits into bits on the monitor could handle lowercase, and I read an article that showed how to piggyback another memory chip onto the video memory to get lowercase, and so I decided to do that. It just so happened that I had one of these chips around, but it's one I had abused -- I used it for experiments. Among other things, it got sucked through a vacuum cleaner once, but I had unbent the pins and kept it. And that's the chip that went into my TRS-80. But it turns out that it just wouldn't work cold because of the abuse I had given it. Once it got warm then it worked just fine, and that's why my computer needed a minute to warm up before you could see regular characters on the screen.
Re:Diamond Viper Z200 (Savage 2000) (Score:3, Interesting)
Take for example, DOS. You can't get much uglier and useless than DOS. Yet because it's so ugly and useless, it's also the most stable OS in the world. No, really! DOS is incredibly simple (there's a (practically) complete open-source clone of it (FreeDOS), and it only took a few years), so there basically is no OS to crash, only applications. And I bet you've seen a computer running DOS within the last week or two.
IBM System 32. (Score:4, Interesting)
Boss stopped me, suggested I leave those behind and we stopped at the diesel mechanics shop for crowbars, a hacksaw, and a few 4 pound sledgehammers. I was like
Get there and this thing is a beast. The printer frame was cast aluminum about the same size and strength as the intake manifold and heads on a Chevy V8 engine. The computer itself was made of 1" steel square tubing that was like a quarter inch thick, the bolts that held it together looked like something you would use on a house. The hard drive was a single platter, and the base housing was cast bronze or something, weighed about 20 - 25 lbs or so, about the size of a current ATX desktop case, and the motor for the drive was a monster 220V electric motor about the size of a small pumpkin - half horsepower maybe?
I have no clue why I was there taking that monster apart, but I got a real good appreciation for how Tonka tough IBM used to make their computers. Probably less powerful than my $50 calculator but built like a tank.
IIcx through a flood (Score:3, Interesting)
Turned out it'd been half submerged in a flood then populated by mice. Between the silt, leaves, mouse pee, water and mouse crap it was in a sad state.
EVERYTHING got a thorough soaking cleaning under detergent and hot running water, then warming and drying. Thankfully the peeing rodents hadn't been there long enough to corrode too much. A spray over with silicon based furniture polish stopped anything on the motherboard corroding anymore in the last 2 years. Still works fine, HD and all