Resiliency of older hardware

[Dustin2128]

I was kind of impressed when tooling up for an older machine project earlier this night, by the functionality of some older hardware in my possession. The machine in question is a Pentium II 450MHz which I put 384Mb of salvaged RAM into. After installing some fitting and not-so-fitting hardware, a Voodoo 3, 14.4Gb HDD, and a multi-DVD burner, I started up a debian stable install- all good so far. All of that taken individually from my hardware bin, hooked up with stuff from my wires bin, some of that having been unused for up to 10 years. Even more, the pentium II, case, and motherboard had actually been on my back porch for almost a year! By contrast, I've lost plenty of pentium 4 era IDE hard drives, RAM, motherboards, processors, stuff that's unrecoverable, and plenty of core architecture celerons to boot. Recently lost 1GB of 3 year old DDR RAM for no apparent reason, hard drives just stop working, etc. Is it just that computers are more commoditized today than they were in the mid to late nineties? I still have just about every piece of hardware I had then. But maybe it's just nostalgia ;)

[RoflHaxBbq]

I know that feel, bro.
It seems that even hardware that is only 10 years or so old is still working, but 1 and 2 year old hardware, such as the fans in my other computer, are stuffed.

[Dustin2128]

I think I know what I'm doing with this one now- install was a complete success and found out that I had something infinitely more useful to me than a voodoo 3- an ancient nVidia TNT card with 16MB RAM. Kinda crappy old card, but it's got a solid linux driver and should be able to handle some of the basic 3D acceleration I'd like it to. I might be set for an xfce desktop, actually. Say hello to my new web server, file server, torrent seeder, music player, and alarm clock!

[blueturtl]

Most o'ya geeks couldn't kill a first-gen Pentium if you tried. Even the second gen machines were still pretty tough. It get's pretty flaky after that rather quickly.

To destroy a 386 to an unbootable condition, you need to drop it out of a third story window (no, second story won't do it).

[Dustin2128]

Most o'ya geeks couldn't kill a first-gen Pentium if you tried. Even the second gen machines were still pretty tough. It get's pretty flaky after that rather quickly.

To destroy a 386 to an unbootable condition, you need to drop it out of a third story window (no, second story won't do it).
Shame I still don't have my old pentium, it'd be... interesting to see what I could do with it today. I'd love to be able to mess around with some i486 era hardware.

[Bandit]

Most o'ya geeks couldn't kill a first-gen Pentium if you tried. Even the second gen machines were still pretty tough. It get's pretty flaky after that rather quickly.

To destroy a 386 to an unbootable condition, you need to drop it out of a third story window (no, second story won't do it).

LOL I concur.. I still got a 386DX at home I put Win95 on for lols and it works good.

[Astarroth]

I have to agree. The older pc's are like the old timex watches ... they take a licking and keep on ticking. Have an old Dell p3 800 mhz that I set up as a domain controller, put 3 gigs of ram in it and it runs better than my amd xp2400 system. I love working with the older systems.

[LowSky]

The reason newer equipment dies so quickly compared to the old stuff is due to lead free solder. The newer solder has a habit of growing crystal like branches and causing shorts.

As for hard drive failures, well that is purely because of the amount of parts going into the new drives. Pick up a 20GB drive then pick up a 2TB drive, he 2TB drive will be heavier. The heavier means more drive wear and that can lead to lesser lifetime.

But don't forget that the new stuff operates at faster speeds, and in more frequent. We didn't have files that took up Gigabytes of space 10 years ago. We didn't have operating systems that could be 40Gb alone. We didn't have HD movies or Bluetooth devices or DVD drives in all our PC's. Video cards had megabytes of RAM not gigabytes. Most computers had 15" screens, you were lucky to own anything larger.

So when people say things don't last as long I tend to disagree. We simply didn't use them as much. The best example is cars. 50 Years ago if you saw a car with 100,000 miles you would have never though of buying it, plus it would be 10-15 years old. Now a car can reach 100,000 miles in less than 4-5 years for most people, and people who might buy used don't really worry about 100,000 miles like they once did.

[Spice Weasel]

I have a 13 year old ultraportable laptop that is still working perfectly and stable. I'm worried about the hard drive; it looks nonstandard and like it would be a pain in the **** to replace. :(

[weasel fierce]

while it isnt hooked up right now, I have an amiga 1200 from 1992 still humming along just fine :)

[blueturtl]

LowSky has some valid points.

The sheer power consumption (and thus heat) on the new stuff wears it out quicker. I have a K6-3+ running at 400 MHz cooled by a heatsink alone and a PentiumIII 1 GHz that has a massive heatsink without a fan.

Nobody in their right mind would try to run a Core2 or an i7 without a fan cooling it. Even with fans, it's accepted that the operating temps will be higher, nevermind all the hardcore video cards and other things that get hot in computers today.

Butt..!

Stuff was also a bit overengineered in the 90's (and I think this was good). If you drop a modern keyboard on the floor it might break. If you drop a Model M on the floor, the floor will break. :D

The overengineering together with lower operating frequencies and temperatures is probably what makes the older hardware eternal. The lead was an interesting point too.

[weasel fierce]

Stuff was also a bit overengineered in the 90's (and I think this was good). If you drop a modern keyboard on the floor it might break. If you drop a Model M on the floor, the floor will break. :D


I loooove old keyboards :)

Doubles as self-defense if need be

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop from 2003. The thing is build like a tank. You wouldn't want to carry it around all day. It weighs 3.7 kg or 8.2 lbs. Everything still works; however, I did upgrade it from 256MiB to 1GiB of RAM a few years ago. The battery still holds a charge for 2 hours and it was only 3.5 hours when it was new. It runs Debian well on its 2.4 GHz single core processor.

[Frogs Hair]

My old Gateway had a Celeron 400Mz CPU with a heat sink and there was a plastic shroud inside that directed air flow from the power supply to the heat sink . Had I known more about Linux at the time I recycled it , I may have kept it . The CPU was too under powered to run Flash and the older versions would not work any more.

[walt.smith1960]

Good quality 3-5 year old equipment might be good for several more years mechanically/electrically but it won't run the latest from Redmond or Cupertino. Minimum practical system requirements ramp up with every new OS release. From the manufacturer's stand point, why spend the extra money and have to charge more for a really durable system that is running great but is functionally obsolete. If software were to become more efficient so it relied less on "sheer horsepower" and more on quality engineering machines might not become obsolete so quickly.

[Dustin2128]

If you drop a modern keyboard on the floor it might break. If you drop a Model M on the floor, the floor will break. :D

+1 to that. I've actually got some variant of the Model M plugged into the computer to match the case and monitor ;). Off-color beige for the win!

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

Shame I still don't have my old pentium, it'd be... interesting to see what I could do with it today. I'd love to be able to mess around with some i486 era hardware.

I had a 486DX2 laptop. I couldn't boot from anything other than a floppy. I think it had DOS 3.1 and Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.. DOS 3.1 and Microsoft office (although it wasn't a single product then) was installed from a stack of 10 to 20 floppies if I remember correctly. I found a floppy that would allow me to mount and load an OS from the CD drive and eventually got a Linux distro working on it. I was fun trying; however, I really couldn't find a use for it with only a 66 MHz processor. I recycled it several years ago.

[Paqman]

Is it just that computers are more commoditized today than they were in the mid to late nineties?

Nope. Electronics, like anything really, can be generalised to fit what reliability engineers call a bathtub curve:
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s99/electronic_electrical/bathtub.gif

Generally speaking, you'll have quite a lot of early failures, followed by a long period of relatively low "random" failures, then another peak as things get generally knackered towards the end of their life.

For an individual electronic item, if it doesn't suffer from any production defects that will cause it to flop early it could have a surprisingly long useful life. This is more common in solid state devices (PCBs like motherboards, RAM and NICs) than in mechanical ones like optical drives and hard drives. The number of moving parts is directly proportional to likelihood of failure.

So for a solid state device which has worked well for a few years, there's a pretty decent chance of it continuing to soldier on for quite few more, while newer flashier stuff may seem to be dropping like flies. However, it would have looked exactly the same when your old warhorse equipment was new on the block. You've just ended up with one of the survivors.

[NMFTM]

If software were to become more efficient so it relied less on "sheer horsepower" and more on quality engineering machines might not become obsolete so quickly.
I don't know much about programming, but I'm sure that's much easier said than done or everyone would've been doing it all these years. If there were no release dates and an unlimited amount of manpower to write everything in assembly language, things could be much more efficient.

But in the real world we have layer upon layer of abstraction. On one hand, this allows for rapid development and things to get done in a shorter period of time due to the amount of "shortcuts" these abstraction layers provide. But the downside to these is that more abstraction leads to slower products. Look at Java, very useful and productive, but very slow.

I could be wrong though about all of this, someone correct me if I'm off base.

[walt.smith1960]

I don't know much about programming, but I'm sure that's much easier said than done or everyone would've been doing it all these years. If there were no release dates and an unlimited amount of manpower to write everything in assembly language, things could be much more efficient.

But in the real world we have layer upon layer of abstraction. On one hand, this allows for rapid development and things to get done in a shorter period of time due to the amount of "shortcuts" these abstraction layers provide. But the downside to these is that more abstraction leads to slower products. Look at Java, very useful and productive, but very slow.

I could be wrong though about all of this, someone correct me if I'm off base.

I'm certain I know less about programming than you :redface:. I just wonder if the IT business is where the U.S. auto industry was in the '70s. They wanted people to buy new cars every 3-4 years and built new cars that would need replacing sooner rather than later. Japanese car manufacturers put a kink in that business model. It isn't in Intel and Microsoft's best interest for us to keep PCs for too long. In North America at least, the majority of people who want a PC have one. Where do new sales come from? "Upgrades". The more often the better from the industry's POV.

[blueturtl]

I'm certain I know less about programming than you :redface:. I just wonder if the IT business is where the U.S. auto industry was in the '70s. They wanted people to buy new cars every 3-4 years and built new cars that would need replacing sooner rather than later. Japanese car manufacturers put a kink in that business model. It isn't in Intel and Microsoft's best interest for us to keep PCs for too long. In North America at least, the majority of people who want a PC have one. Where do new sales come from? "Upgrades". The more often the better from the industry's POV.

This is actually the best reason I think we won't see Linux on store shelves for a long time. Bloatware sells new hardware.

Not that the quad cores wouldn't have their genuine uses, but for the average office worker there are few changes that truly require the kind of horsepower the new machines have.

[NMFTM]

Not that the quad cores wouldn't have their genuine uses, but for the average office worker there are few changes that truly require the kind of horsepower the new machines have.
Some businesses (e.g. every single auto-parts store) are still using CLI programs on their GUI machines. About a year ago I saw someone at a point-of-sale computer running Windows XP ringing up my items on a windowed PuTTY session.

I'm certain I know less about programming than you :redface:.
Almost all of my programming knowledge is overly simplified explanations of programming theory. When it comes to actually coding, I know how to do simple loops. Anything beyond that is beyond me.

Think of layers of abstraction (binary code --> assembly language --> low level languages (C) --> higher leveled languages (Java) --> really high level languages (Alice)) like like transmission in a car.

Lower level languages (manual transmission) requires more time to learn to use, but it's more efficient, you can get a few more horsepower out of the car, which is why racecars are all manual. Higher level languages (automatic transmission) require less time to learn and the workings of the engine changing gears is hidden (abstracted) from the user via the automatic gear changer. But you also loose some horsepower.

Modern software is the same way, only instead of one layer of abstraction like automatic transmission has, it's more like a whole bunch of layers. A video game doesn't talk directly to the graphics card, it talks to the OS which talks to the drivers which talks to the graphics card. It's like the difference between being able to naively speak to someone in their language vs having a translator. Translators are easier because you don't need to learn anything new, but it slows things down.

I just wonder if the IT business is where the U.S. auto industry was in the '70s. They wanted people to buy new cars every 3-4 years and built new cars that would need replacing sooner rather than later.
That might be the case in the end-user market. But only a very small number of programmers are employed to write code for anything that's sold in a store or released to the general public. Most are employed for strictly in-house purposes and their code never leaves the office building they sit in.

That's not to say that you're wrong though, there could be a conspiracy between hardware and software manufacturers. I don't really understand why Windows 7 is so much bigger than the latest Ubuntu release when Linux OS's tend to require so many more dependencies to do even the simplest things. For example, on a Linux system you might have GTK and Qt apps, which requires you to have both libraries installed. Windows just uses the Windows Toolkit.

[Khakilang]

Same here with me. although mine is slight slower. Pentium II with 128MB RAM. Try to install Puppy Linux but came out with an error. Damn small Linux seem to works fine. Good for you!

[Dustin2128]

Same here with me. although mine is slight slower. Pentium II with 128MB RAM. Try to install Puppy Linux but came out with an error. Damn small Linux seem to works fine. Good for you!
Did you ever test a gentoo install with it? I'm doing so now, actually. Still compiling :). I'll kick the ram down to 128MB and see how openbox preforms if you like.

As for the discussion at hand, I figure the day the OEMs figure out how to put a bunch of crapware on linux a la android or windows, will be the day of the linux desktop.

[Khakilang]

Did you ever test a gentoo install with it? I'm doing so now, actually. Still compiling :). I'll kick the ram down to 128MB and see how openbox preforms if you like.

As for the discussion at hand, I figure the day the OEMs figure out how to put a bunch of crapware on linux a la android or windows, will be the day of the linux desktop.

I have downloaded the ISO but I think I may need more time to master all those command line. But I believe it is a good way to learn Linux. Please refer to my other thread on "Really Old computer. What To Do" which I just post or maybe merge it with this thread.:D

[Dustin2128]

I have to agree. The older pc's are like the old timex watches ... they take a licking and keep on ticking. Have an old Dell p3 800 mhz that I set up as a domain controller, put 3 gigs of ram in it and it runs better than my amd xp2400 system. I love working with the older systems.
How did you stick 3 gigs of ram in a pentium 3 era motherboard? Nothing pre-DDR comes in 1GB/stick densities, indeed, I've never seen anything pre-DDR denser than 256Mb a stick.

[jjpcexpert]

I'm certain I know less about programming than you :redface:. I just wonder if the IT business is where the U.S. auto industry was in the '70s. They wanted people to buy new cars every 3-4 years and built new cars that would need replacing sooner rather than later. Japanese car manufacturers put a kink in that business model. It isn't in Intel and Microsoft's best interest for us to keep PCs for too long. In North America at least, the majority of people who want a PC have one. Where do new sales come from? "Upgrades". The more often the better from the industry's POV.


I feel that it IS in Intel's best interest, but not M$es, to make things to last, so that it gets a reliability reputation.