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."
Microsoft survival (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:IBM System 32. (Score:2, Insightful)
Search ebay to see what a classic pdp-8 goes for now, generally more than a good used car is worth. Admittedly a pdp-8 is a little more popular, but I'm sure you could have gotten a heck of a lot of "beer money", or at least someone would have hauled it away for free, saving you the effort.
Re:IBM System 32. (Score:2)
Tough CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tough CPU (Score:2)
The shack (Score:5, Funny)
That was one for the record books.
Re:The shack (Score:2, Funny)
Clarification? (Score:2)
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 marke
Re:Panasonic Toughbook CF-28 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Panasonic Toughbook CF-28 (Score:3, Informative)
My roomate's XBOX (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s (Score:2)
Re:Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s (Score:2)
Re:Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the most interesting thing about this ad is the footnote: "* Mr. Espina's notarized statement is on file with the Marantz Company." It seems so
These days that ad would probably be a hyperbolic "Extreme Marantz!" depiction of someone using it to put out a grease fire, plunge a toilet, jack up a car to fix a flat tire, and finally pound some nails before finally turning it on to
Re:Classic Marantz ad from the 1970s (Score:2)
His father was a TV engineer, and he'd replaced an old black-and-white portable for someone. It was on a shelf above the customer's cooker, there had been a chip pan fire, and the plastic case of the TV had melted. The tube had tilted back under its own weight, and the top of the case had slumped over it.
The melted telly lay around the workshop until my mate's
Memory and low temperatures (Score:5, Informative)
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: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... tr
Re:Memory and low temperatures (Score:2)
Ashes In & Around Computers (Score:2)
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.
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:2)
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:2)
With gear prices decreasing all around, maybe they'll come up with disposable laptops soon.
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:3, Funny)
No, he needs a desktop.
Or an etch-a-sketch.
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 f
iBook ran over by 250+ lb man on his bike (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:3)
Of course, we cannot forget the PowerBook that was baked in an oven [mac.com] for 20 minutes at 400degF [mac.com] yet somehow still had a working (though cracked) screen. [mac.com]
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:IBM Thinkpad laptop (Score:2)
My SCSI drive (Score:5, Funny)
You can cook eggs on it while it's running, but it still works.
Re:My SCSI drive (Score:2)
On topic: the coffee has splished, and the eggs have splattered more than once. they still run dandy.
Diamond Viper Z200 (Savage 2000) (Score:4, Interesting)
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 b
Vintage Macs (Score:4, Interesting)
Old hard drives (Score:4, Funny)
Someone tried to sell us a pretty old computer and when we told them it wasn't worth anything they ask us to trash it. The hard drive in the system was an old MFM 5.5 inch full height drive that had a non-removable cover. We tried to break it open with a hammer and could barely scratch the thing. I swear that you could have thrown the thing out of an airplane and it would surface scan ok.
Another time we had a custom throw their own computer through a wall after Windows locked up on them. The only thing that didn't have any damage was a USR 56k ISA modem. But that was only until we gave the modem back to the customer and he broke it into two piece in the front of our store(I personally think he had issues). It did take him about 5 minutes to crack the thing though....
Re:Old hard drives (Score:3, Funny)
To segue this back to topic, system #4 was a 286. After I'd had it a few years, I added a 287 (math coprocessor for the youngsters) that I bought used on Usenet.
That 287 turned out to be one chip with a deathwish; for some reason, it ran at about 300 degrees F. (Yes, it would boil drops of water.) The system would shut down after about 10 minutes.
But after I added a makeshift aluminum heatsink, it was fine. And that systems still works
Wrong chip? (Score:2)
Anyway, I stuck it in my Compaq Deskpro 286 which was, of course, 8MHz. It worked fine but got rather hot. Never needed a heatsink though. Possibly if it had been clocked to 10 or 12MHz it would have.
That was in the days when overclocking meant something. Goi
Mind sharing? (Score:2, Insightful)
A Casio Data Bank 50 calculator watch (Score:2)
The Data Bank line is "water resistant" so I figured I'd try to kill it by putting it in a plastic cup filled with water and left in the freezer portion of a refrigerator over night. I forgot about it and, about a week later, saw it sitting in the little block of ice I'd made.
After busting the watch out the display was dim but still fully fun
Re:A Casio Data Bank 50 calculator watch (Score:2)
Many months later we were having our septic tank emptied, and the workers found my watch in the yard. This thing had spent a good portion of a year (if not more) in our yard in rural Connecticut (I don't live there anymore, thankfully), and had clearly been put through the lawnmower. Half of the watch band was missing. It still worked, and I kept it until the battery died a while ago.
And ironically I now own a Casio
Hardiest hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hardiest hardware (Score:2)
There's some information about Pioneer 6 on that page. It was launched on 16 December 1965 and last time they checked (in 1996) it was still working.
Floodwaters... (Score:5, Funny)
The next week I had some free time and noticed the box sitting in the corner. I took it out back, turned the hose on it, removed and washed the cpu and memory, took it inside and plugged it in.
They were still using that computer as the fax server when I quit.
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
Re:Amiga Floppy (Score:2)
--trb
Old Tektronix o'scopes (Score:2)
Re:Old Tektronix o'scopes (Score:2)
Recently my parents moved and the power plug was torn off, but that's a simple solder. My mom wants to chuck it, but I refuse to - this baby has set a belief in my mind that anything with hand-painted resistors will outlast m
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....
Anything Nintendo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Anything Nintendo (Score:2)
Nintendo controllers and systems have classically been made of ultra-durable plastic of doom. I remember throwing controllers again brick walls, and dropping gamecubes painfully high distances. Of course, I've never had any of these things break or stop working. I'm sure that when cockroaches rule the earth they will all play SNES games.
Yes, I can confirm this :-) Back when me and my brother were playing SNES he often got very angry with some games and held the joypad by the cable and smacked the pad to
Re:Anything Nintendo (Score:2)
The indestructible toy is very useful for destroying other toys.
Re:XBOX just trumped that today. (Score:2)
Re:Anything Nintendo (Score:2)
I had a friend in college who would jerk the controller around whenever he was doing badly in a multiplayer game. This resulted in my n64 falling several feet to the floor on multiple occasions before I found a good place to put it.
It still mostly works, but a few games like Perfect Dark just wouldn't work in it anymore. It would tend to lockup a lot too. In the end I sold it to him for $30 and bought a new one for $50. Not bad, considering I wanted a new controller anywa
Fire Fire Fire (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out (and I know I've done this many times before without starting any type of fire) I had the ribbon cable in backwards on the floppy drive. When I turned the power on, immediately the power wires started glowing orange and the flames were about a foot high and smoke poured out of the case.
After I pulled the plug, only one segment of the power harness was melted (the part with the small floppy connector), so I cut that out, put the floppy cable in correctly, plugged in the other floppy power lead, and turned it back on.
Shocked the Hell outta me, but the thing still worked, and has been working ever since.
Re:Fire Fire Fire (Score:3, Funny)
Because then you wouldn't buy their product as often, silly!
Re:Fire Fire Fire (Score:3, Insightful)
So, we jammed it in--backwards...
He told us to wait for him to check everything out, but I was impatient. I plugged it in, turned it on
You know, you really are a prime fucking luser.
The guy was actually a bit of a jerk--he was like, "you know, I have half a mind to bill you for that!".
Too bloody right - he should have. You broke his equipment through stupidity and negligence. You were on a course to _learn_ shit, not break it.
Re:Fire Fire Fire (Score:2)
Re:Fire Fire Fire (Score:2)
b) Unlike 'a' above, if you plug the floppy POWER connector in backwards... yes, that might cause a fire.
BUT...
A person has to be a real freakin moron to be able to jam that plug upside down (backward, whatever) onto the pins.
They 'could' install a couple of diodes to keep idiots from frying their hardware, but the plug and recepticle are already keyed. Manufacturers can try to idiot proof everything, but there's always a more cu
Sharp Zaurus (Score:2)
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.
Moto StarTAC (Score:2)
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
Seagate ST-255 HDD (Score:2)
HP laser printers and servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HP laser printers and servers (Score:2)
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 bee
Re:Old PPC Motherboard (Score:2)
You have to show 'em who's the boss.
There was this freeware project for the Amiga 2000 where you could get instructions and parts to solder a Zorro-ISA bridgeboard and use the ISA slots in an Amiga 2000 for stuff like network cards. Normally, those ISA slots were for the Commodore PC-on-a-card 8086, 286 and 386 cards, but with this hack, you could use them from the Amiga (with the proper drivers, of course). Anyway, my card didn't really want to work and after
CF Cards and the Spin Cycle (Score:2)
Cut to two weeks later and I'm pulling clothes from the washing machine, then I hear a clatter on the floor. Cue guttaral moan that could probably be hard across t
My trusty hammer (Score:5, Funny)
Sure I've had to change the head a couple of times, and also the handle, but aside from that it's as good as new.
My trusty body (Score:3, Funny)
I had to change the head a couple times, but it still works! Can't say much for the looks, but it's almost impossible to move a soul from one body to another and all that.
Only problem is that now all my attempts at humor on slashdot are duds.
Sony Discman (Score:4, Funny)
My Old Toshiba (Score:2)
Model M (Score:2)
OK, I didn't really. But I'm sure I could have, those things really are invincible (also big and heavy) - fire, physical shock, water (or beer), nothing hurts them.
Compact Flash is tougher than hell (Score:2)
Trs-80's (Score:2)
Bernoulli disks, bar none (Score:3, Funny)
I used to leave them in my car for days on end in mid-winter (and this is New England - it gets pretty danged cold here) and use them with no problem. But one time, I had no better alternative to use as an ice scraper, so I used a Bernoulli 90 disk, figuring the disk would be toast afterwards (but hey, it was free, so why not sacrifice it?). So I chipped the ice off my car with it and didn't think twice about it.
The disk worked with no problems at all for years afterwards.
Needless to say, the later Zip and Jaz drives were nowhere near as rugged, but Zip was the most rugged small media format (the drives were fragile, but the disks were pretty tough) you could get easily until flash drives took off the last couple of years. SyQuest disks, OTOH, would die if you looked at them funny.
Re:Bernoulli disks, bar none (Score:2)
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, a
Heh. (Score:2)
Old HD (Score:2)
Re:Old HD (Score:3, Funny)
I've been doing it all wrong. Let me know how it works out.
p166w/mmx (Score:2, Funny)
Compaq E700 laptop + Duck (Score:2)
Timex Triathlon Watch (Score:2)
GE MTL Radio (Score:2)
One of my customers, a mining company, had just taken delivery of a new GE radio system including MTL model portable radios. One of the foremen kept sending his radio in for repair and I couldn't find anything wrong with it. I went out to talk to him in person about the prob
Mac IIcx (Score:2)
So one day I'm sitting in my apartment working on the IIcx when I hear the shriek of a table saw coming from next door and the lights start to go dim i
Back in college (Score:2)
The coal mine owned a bunch of IBM PS/2 model 60s and 80s which where down the shaft, and their job was to record the incoming coal trains with the load information (ran coax back to the shaft).
I had to open them a few times and I learned after the first time to wear clothes that I didn't care about since the coal dust was everywhere. Power supplies where stuffed, about 4 inches of the crap on every surface inside the c
Good timing (Score:2)
indestructible cell phone (Score:2, Funny)
IBM 3812 Line Printer (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Wacom Tablet (Score:2)
Re:HP Calculators (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HP Calculators (Score:2)
Re:Here's a pair. (Score:2)
What magic do you suppose the power switch does?