Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Problems in Computer Conservation 256

Posted by michael from the don't-make-em-like-they-used-to dept.
sobachatina writes "The Computer museum at The University of Amsterdam has an interesting page with examples of the problems that they run into maintaining 20+ year old hardware such as rubber rollers from card readers melting or mold growing inside CRT terminals.I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Problems in Computer Conservation More

Problems in Computer Conservation

Comments Filter:

  • No moldy monitors @home (Score:5, Funny)

    by tcd004 ( 134130 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:17PM (#5516836) Homepage
    This has never been a problem for the folks down at Not@Home cable internet servce. [lostbrain.com]

    Just check out their state-of-the-art equipment!

    tcd004
    • This has never been a problem for the folks down at Not@Home cable internet servce. [lostbrain.com]

      Wow you have 20+ year old monitors? Wow. May I borrow your punch card reader for a while? And I suppose your account maintenance software is written in ALGOL as well.

      ALGOL? What a horrid name! The name Al'Gol translates from Arabic as "The Ghoul" (and is the name of a star in the constellation Perseus).

  • Yet another reason... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:17PM (#5516837) Homepage
    for going solid state all the way.

    • please explain (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )
      "solid state all the way"

      My homebrew amplifier is using 2A3 tubes from the 1930's, I don't see a problem.

    • for going solid state all the way.

      Unfortunately those solid state things die too. If you're lucky and all the packaging is ceramic and not plastic even the chips grow little connectors when operating and short themselves out. If you kept them very cool or never power them up, they would last a very long time, but diffusion will get them eventually. Especially with the tiny transistors in today's chips, when you can count the atoms on your hands and toes between two signals that should never cross you know
    • Build it out of wood. I hear that works pretty good for houses.

  • Mold? That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:17PM (#5516838)
    I work as tech support, and the other day I opened up a computer case. I thought the dust bunny in there the size of my fist was a rat at first and figured it was about to jump out and bite me.
    • Well, about 10 years ago a ct brought in an old IBM PC that was used for some type of server apps. It had stopped working and the ct wanted us to fix it. I removed the cover and it was not just A dust-bunny. The whole interior was completly covered in a dust-mat. I used some compressed air to blow it clean and then a vacuum-cleaner to remove the rest and applied some electronic cleaner. The PC started right up again, ct happy, me charged them big bucks :)
    • Heh. When I installed my new master hard drive recently, I ended up having to peel off dust. It was caked between the heat sink and the fan, slowing down the fan and completely blocking airflow across the heatsink. My average CPU temp dropped from 60 to 40 degrees after I peeled it off.
    • I was de-bugging a radio stations computer system that wasn't playing music (no music == bad) so I had to crawl over the on-air console and go behind the built in furniture. My GOD! HUGE lumps of dust, and wire... running... everywhere and nowhere at the SAME TIME! It turns out the problem was a home-made null-modem cable connecting the scheduling computer with the playing computer (most important systems in the station, responsible for playing all music over the air) was resting under the UPS they had b

      • Re:Mold? That's nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by unitron ( 5733 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @01:11AM (#5517585) Homepage Journal
        That is (or at least was, before stations went all robot all the time) a major problem with radio station control rooms, it's a major hassle to dust and vacuum while somebody's doing an air shift, especially when you have to be careful not to suck up one of those temporary repairs that have been hanging out the back of some piece of equipment for the last 20 years (and of course it was installed by an engineer who's been gone almost that long and never documented anything anyway).

    • Re:Mold? That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)

      by ejaw5 ( 570071 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @12:13AM (#5517377)
      sounds like the hampster powering the computer fell off it's wheel.
    • at the shop I used to work at, they got in this laptop. slowly dying, couldn't figure it out.

      tip it side to side, and a distinct slurshing sound.

      Open it up and find Urine, the whole thing was full of Bunny urine from the customers pet bunny.

      The kicker is it took a few days for it to go out and they continued to use it.

  • And with all the porn people look at today... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:19PM (#5516847)
    The problems for future computers are going to be worse! Ewwwww!

  • Mold, nothin'! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Satan's Minion 666 ( 653186 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:20PM (#5516849) Journal
    I'm fairly certain that enough particles have wafted in for some really nice little pot trees to be growing in my CPU by now...

  • Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:22PM (#5516861) Homepage
    They should stop running their webservers on the antique computers. Then they would last longer...and maybe they wouldn't be /.'d already.

  • Hermetically sealed vacuum containers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:23PM (#5516872) Homepage Journal
    Suck the air out of the exhibits and you'd probably be able to preserve those exhibits a little bit longer.

    And if all else fails, take a picture and put it up when the original machine has fallen to pieces.
    • Actualy, one way to do it is to keep it in a UV+IR filtered case, displace all the air with ozone, then displace that with nitrogen.

      That way, what ever that was in there would have been killed by the ozone then if it wasn't killed, it'll have to live in an oxygen and CO2 free enviorment. Add to that, all things plant based would die because there would be the lack of UV light for photosyntesis and at the same time, you don't get the damage UV deals on sensitive materials.

    • So many Amigas have been killed by crap leaking from batteries, it soaks into multi-layer boards aand dissolves tracks where you can't get at them.

      Add to that things like capacitor electrolytes, and I think the only place we're going to be able to maintain old computers is as VMs, such as Amiga Forever.

      Xix.

  • hrm (Score:3, Funny)

    by pummer ( 637413 ) <spam&pumm,org> on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:24PM (#5516879) Homepage Journal
    I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!

    That's when you know it's time to buy an lcd.

  • Heh (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 )
    Did anybody else misread that headline and think it was about IPV6?

    • Re:Heh (Score:3, Funny)

      by antistuff ( 233076 )
      Ummm...no. Nobody read it that way.

      Lay off the crack pipe.
    • "Misread Headline for something completely different"

      I mean, really. Your nick is only different to "Anonymous Coward" by one character, and I still didn't misread that.

      This deserves to be modded, but not +Funny. Did anyone else read that as -1, Dummy?

  • CDR - advances in durability? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sploxx ( 622853 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:29PM (#5516911)
    Interestingly enough, the old technology is not considered the best, at least not as a backup medium. This is the thing most of the preservation efforts go and should go into.

    Admitted, paper lasts very long, there is enough ancient evidence :)

    But look e.g. here http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa13.htm,

    they say that CD-Rs last 50-200 years(!)
    Compare that to magnetic tapes, discs, etc.

    But the final solution for very important data may well be the engraving into gold-plated aluminium, as the NASA did it for pioneer 10...

    It seems that mechanically changed media (stones, CD recordables etc.) have the longest lifetime.

    • Re:CDR - advances in durability? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:49PM (#5517022)
      Well, "paper" has changed over the years. old scrolls, manuscripts, and books are on thin animal skin (vellum) and can last 2,000+ years under the right conditions....the wood based stuff we usually call paper oxidizes, turning dark and crumbling in less than 100 years unless special preservation steps are taken. For paper made of cloth rag, you can get 100-200 years (paper until the 19th century was made this way). Some combinations of inkjet/laser toner and rag "paper" can last 140+ years, it's claimed.

    • CD-Rs aren't "mechanically changed." (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jfisherwa ( 323744 ) <{jason.fisher} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday March 15, 2003 @12:14AM (#5517379) Homepage
      CD-Rs use an organic dye which reacts to the recording laser in a CD-R burner, causing it to melt and pit--it then becomes non-translucent and the reading laser is refracted when it attempts to read those portions of the disc.

      There are several known cases of bacteria and fungus attacking this organic dye, not including the obvious danger that heat and sunlight pose to it.

      "Regular" CDs use a polycarbonate substrate instead which is literally stamped into the CD during an injection moulding process. THIS is a mechanical change, giving the advantage that a stamped CD could very well last 50-200 years, whereas a burned CD-R that is not hermetically sealed will be lucky to last 10-20.

      It seems that what we need is an inorganic hybrid of a stamping machine and a CD-R burner, something that can (using a much more powerful laser) physically inscribe the bits into a polycarbonate-like material. The nice thing about a technology like this being adopted, is that the firmware could be modified to allow the same machine to create CDs, DVDs, and whatever else they throw at us within that form-factor. Even better would be the ability to come up with your own (Open Source?) disc data storage format.

      Anyone want to play devil's advocate on that idea? Apart from cost, I could see consumables and waste being an issue.

      Jason Fisher :P [colonpee.com]

    • CDs, nope. (Score:3, Informative)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      Stop and consider the common mode failure: plastic or rubber failed in every case. What does that tell you about your plastic CD or tape substrate and the readers? Cermaic and glass last all else returns to dust sooner than later. The infamous NPR archive tape case, where ultra expensive tapes failed well before anyone expected is a case in point. You might be able to make a special ceramic CD, but the reader would fail and have to be reconstructed. The best prospects for long term data survival is s

  • You think mold is a problem? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My boss brought in his laptop.

    There was an ant crawling around INSIDE the lcd. You could see him running around ... eventually he left the lcd, and never saw him again. Either he found his way out of the laptop, or got electrocuted.
    • I've heard that some laptops are buggy.

      *commence rotten tomato barrage*
      • I don't know if it's an urban legend, but I've been told that the term "debug" actually came from the fact that they needed to periodically go in and clear the bugs and cobwebs out of the first computers, to get them working again (remember these things used thousands of vacuum tubes and took up whole rooms)

    • My strangest was baby mice. Popped a PC (DEC rainbow) open in my shop and saw these little squirming hairless fetuses, it freaked me right out.

      Ah, the good old days. Think I'll go try to find Thayer's Quest [dragons-lair-project.com] on Ebay.

  • I retired my Compaq transportable 8088 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:42PM (#5516986)
    Just a few years ago. Not because It didn't do what I wanted it to. In fact I rather miss it because it was ideally suited to its task, but because various little mechanical bits of it started to get wonky and I couldn't find replacements.

    I'll be able to custom build a replacement now with the new VIA stuff, and the replacement will undoubtably be "better" than the Compaq, but it's still just plain annoying to have to take a grand or so out of pocket to replace something that did it's job ( and that I only payed $50 for in the first place) and could have continued to do so ad infinitum had a few $5 parts been available.

    And of course its basically working carcass is now sitting in some landfill because none of the local shops even considered it worth taking up space if I gave it to them for free.

    And this could still be a continuing issue. One of the surest ways to force DRM "enabled" machines on the majority of the populace is to simply phase out the bits of the machines people already have making them impossible to keep going.

    It might take 20 years, but businesses seem to find the patience they otherwise lack when it comes to ways to grind down the consumer to the level they desire.

    KFG

    • One of the surest ways to force DRM "enabled" machines on the majority of the populace is to simply phase out the bits of the machines people already have making them impossible to keep going.

      No, the reason you can't get parts is that people are not interested in keeping old ones running. It is cost-prohibitive, and there is very little demand.

      Now, if DRM gets forced upon us, you won't be able to count the sheer number of "kit" computers we will see without the DRM bits. Hey, how far can they really tak

  • ... It just wouldn't seem right without the simulation of the capacitor "popping" in an old VT100. I saw this happen and a little mushroom cloud formed over the top of the terminal. I had to walk over and unplug it as the young woman at the key board wouldn't go back near it.

  • Keyboards (Score:5, Funny)

    by big_groo ( 237634 ) <groovis AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @10:47PM (#5517013) Homepage
    I've solved my 'dirty keyboard' syndrome by purchasing black ones.

    I used to put 'em through the dishwasher.

    Works like a charm.

    (just remember to remove the circuitry, m'kay?)

    • I used to put 'em through the dishwasher.

      Works like a charm.

      (just remember to remove the circuitry, m'kay?)

      Doesn't work with M$ keyboards tho (the only ones that don't give me RSI), since their circuitry is delicately layered on 3 pieces of plastic that have to line up perfectly and are impossible to position till the case is 99% closed.... assholes.
    • (just remember to remove the circuitry, m'kay?)

      There's usually no need to do that when you put your keyboard in the dishwasher. Just make sure the thing is completely dry before you plug it back in. It's about the only sane way to ever get all the Coke out of your keyboard...

      The trusty Kenmore dishwasher is commonly used in a number of electronics firms to remove solder flux and other cruft from prototype boards.
  • how about the opposite?

    plug the thing up the net, pay some cobol programmer to write a server, then put a wish fulfillment story on slashdot to the effect of "proven: microsoft stole source code from linus" or "proven: mp3 pirating good for the economy" and then watch the poor old decrepit things melt or explode. ;-P
  • ...looked like the front rotors on my old 'university' car.

    squeeeeeeee-gggrrrrrr!

  • I still have the "nanosecond" I received from Grace Hopper dinner she spoke at in Milwaukee. I wonder how many of these are still around?

    Probably about a billion.

    def: nanosecond: wire approx 11.98 Inch long, if you don't know why already then you wouldn't be interested.

    • def: nanosecond: wire approx 11.98 Inch long, if you don't know why already then you wouldn't be interested.

      Hopper's law, I presume. Darn, I wish I had one of these ;)
    • You met her?

      I envy you. I hear that she was a fantastic lady.

      Can you tell more about the wires? I know the nanosecond story, but where does the wire fit in? Is 11.98 inches the length that an electron travels in a nanosecond?

  • Related knowledge base for hobbyists (Score:5, Informative)

    by LeninZhiv ( 464864 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @11:04PM (#5517096)
    There have been some interesting discussions about this kind of thing on alt.computers.folklore recently; it might be worth checking out for those who want a more hard-core technical discussion. Myself I prefer to use emulators and avoid aging issues entirely, but then my apartment's too small to indulge in antique hardware...

    o Keeping old hardware alive [google.com]
    o Keeping old CPU's alive [google.com]

    (In addition to this stuff, USENET of course has a number of groups dealing with specific older hardware.)

  • Disposable Culture (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda AT etoyoc DOT com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @11:21PM (#5517165) Homepage Journal
    God, between this post and previous article about houses I wonder it historians 1000 years in the future ares going to look back at the 20th century and think we must have reverted to the stone age. Or maybe we lived a strange immaterial existance. Why else are there no remnents of housing, or roads, or even buildings. (Skyscrapers have a life of 100 years before they have to be torn down because of metal fatigue.)

    Okay, we WILL be leaving behind mountains of trash that future cultures will probably be mining for raw materials.

    • I hear that the WTC was designed to stand for at least 1000 years.

      Guess we'll never find out for sure. :(

    • Who's to say that in 1000 years, we won't have continued the trend until travel is so easy, and life so transitory, that we effectively become nomadic again? Think of being on a business trip for your entire life.
    • On my bike ride home from SXSW tonight I looked at the giant capitol building in Austin and thought about how long that will last. Then riding past campus the main tower and surrounding buildings are all solid stone. I'm not sure about your "metal fatigue" sounds a little like the infamous "bit rot" that audiophiles like to talk about. But we know that stons structures last a LONG time. There are quite a lot of giant stone structures in the US, most federal buildings. In 1000 years I think there will s
    • And you think Stonehenge is the site of some bronze age rave or something right?
    • (Skyscrapers have a life of 100 years before they have to be torn down because of metal fatigue.)

      Give me even one example of a skyscraper that has been torn down because of metal fatigue, and not for some other reason ( disused, make way for a bigger tower, etc)

      • Well the first one was put up in 1920. YOU do the math.

        Actually we has one torn down in Philly. It caught fire halfway up. The fire burned only 3 floors, but they had to tear down the whole stucture.

        It took them 3 years.

  • If they think mold inside a CRT is bad, wait until they try to scrape the pile of molten silicon from the floor of their server room after slashdot's done with it.

  • Been there, didn't do that. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geoffeg ( 15786 ) <geoffegNO@SPAMsloth.org> on Saturday March 15, 2003 @01:06AM (#5517576) Homepage
    When I was a kid I found my dad's old (Texas Instruments, I think) calculator. It had a one line red VFD display and was almost the size of a brick (it weighed sligtly less). I also found a little book of magnetic strips (about the size of a stick of gum). The calculator had a little slot in the left and right sides. You could load "programs" into the calculator by inserting the strip in one side of the calculator and a little motor with a rubber wheel attached would pull it through and spit out the other side. If you were lucky, it had read the strip right and loaded your program.

    Well, after about a dozen of these loads the little rubber wheel attached to the motor fell off, no more contact with the strips. I tried tons of things, tape, pieces of plastic, shaved down washers, nothing worked. I was quite sad when I had to throw it away, it was a fun little toy. I'm sure that now, being older, I could have fixed it. Maybe if I had kept it and fixed it I could still be using it to this day.

    These things wear out and break down but I think if you have enough time, money and resources you could probably keep them going forever.. But, is it worth it? For me it would have been... for the sentimental value.

    Geoffeg

    • I was quite sad when I had to throw it away...

      Argh! Older TI's had lifetime warranties! My dad had one of those that he bought in college. It died sometime in the late 80's/early 90's and they sent him a TI95 (wierd qwerty calc with a cartridge slot) and a pile of cartridges to replace it. Never throw away an old TI calc; you never know what they'll send you as an "equivalent model"

  • Keep the old machines! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @01:46AM (#5517760)
    Now this is a huge problem for some people, but for someone like me (or possibly you, if you're in the right business), this is an enormous opportunity.

    Consider this: In my business, people are using machines as old as 30 years and some may be quite a bit older than those. These machines have everything from punch card readers to tape readers to special floppy drives that are impossible to find nowadays. And of course, these parts go bad, and as luck would have it in this industry, replacing one of these pieces of machinery can completely break a business. Especially with the economy doing as badly as it is now, and manufacturing is at such a low that everybody in this industry is suffering. But I digress.

    The point I'm trying to make is this: If these things (CRTs with mold, rubber wheels melting, etc) are critical to the operation of a really old computer, then someone needs to manufacture them, just like people still manufacture replacement parts for old cars. This is most likely a better idea than replacing these systems with new ones for the following reason: These old systems are proven. A lot was invested into making them reliable and whatever bugs exist are well known by now. Replacing these systems would introduce problems for a long time to come... problems like software not working properly, which is a problem that management has a very difficult time accepting. Try telling your boss that some buffer wasn't flushed and therefore $50,000 just went down the drain. A rubber wheel melting and being replaced is a lot easier to explain to one's manager because everybody knows what a rubber wheel is. And how much does a rubber wheel cost? Even if it has to be specially manufactured and costs the end user $100.00, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than re-engineering the whole damn computer network. And putting up with stupid management (of which I am a member) giving you shit because three months have passed and the new computer network STILL isn't operational due to some stupid SQL program or perl script that has yet to be written, and we've gone ahead and ordered that rubber wheel anyway.

    Negra Modelo. Me llamo Juanito Rodriguez y soy alcoholico.

    • If these things (CRTs with mold, rubber wheels melting, etc) are critical to the operation of a really old computer, then someone needs to manufacture them, just like people still manufacture replacement parts for old cars.

      I think eternally appeasing management with retrofitted old technology is unlikely to save money in the long run. Computers are usually far more complicated than cars, and the cars that are as complicated have computers in them. As time wears on, more parts need more frequent replacement

    • Keep the layers seperate (Score:3, Interesting)

      by xixax ( 44677 )
      Far saner to code to a VM that will continue to work on future hardware and keep storage abstracted. My mainframe friend always tells me they still use punch-card readers, only they don't exist physically any more. Kind of of like how tar writes to "tape drives" that don't exist either, we have phased out tape for desktop backs, but the software is the same.

      I maintain some really old thermal wax colour printers that have crumbling rubber wheels and it *sucks*: The consumables cost a ton, parts are extortio

  • Short lifespan (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @02:04AM (#5517854) Homepage
    It's really sad. Very few computers from the 1960s still work. A group of people in Silicon Valley spent two years restoring an IBM 1620, and it barely worked.

    Electromechanical gear from the 1960s often still works. Working cash registers and jukeboxes from the 1940s and 1950s aren't that rare.

    It's getting worse as gates get smaller, too. Transistors used to last for many decades; now a decade is a good run.

  • If you look at your modern computer the technology is still basically the same as from 30 years ago. CRT's still use the same basic princible. Hard disks are smaller but still have heads. If anything I would say that hard disks are worse in that you can only get a years guarentee on some now.

    So what happens 30 years from now when my Athlon is sitting in the museum. Will they still have to clean out my keyboard? I expect so. Also what about a hard disk head crashing? Yup still would. So I ask what do we nee
  • The problem goes beyond specific aging hardware. It's also about keeping access to current software or even art. Here is the introduction for this column [weblogs.com]. "This article raises an interesting question: how can we preserve access to all the digital contents we are creating today. As you all know, technologies evolved -- and fast. How will you read an e-mail or an MP3 file twenty years from now? Maybe in a museum, maybe nowhere." On art conservation, you can read "Art restoration and Technology: Two cultures u [weblogs.com]
  • Here is another link [thetechboard.com] with pictures of some messed up hardware. In this case it was mainly due to user error, but it's amazing what people will do to those poor machines. My favorites are people who mailed motherboards in the original store-display box, and those who put memory in backwards.
  • Mechanisms are repairable, metal, plastic etc. can be reproduced. It's the chips and storage mediums that cause the real problems, tapes start to flake and chips fail. It's becomes like old cars, just like you end up scrapping one or two computers to fix another one.
  • A couple of items that I still use:

    1. An Acer keyboard, (Model 6512, Circa 1994) I am typing on it right now. This thing is built like a brick and I happened on it when by workplace gave away all the pre-Y2K computers to the employees. Much stronger than an old IBM keyboard and built to last. It just happens to have an ATX plug on it. When I snapped a Ctrl key on a much more modern keyboard playing a game, I picked this thing up off the pile of old equipment because it was the only thing that would work

  • Mold (Score:2, Funny)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 )
    I've got an ADM3A terminal with a moldy monitor. I'm also allergic to penicillin and get hay fever symptoms when the mold count is high. The night I found it, I had a light ear infection. The next morning my ear was fine, but I had hives all over. Apparently the mold in the monitor was related to penicillin and I got an antibotic reaction from it! Later messing with it didn't give me an allergic reaction, though.

    Unfortunately the ADM3A doesn't work. It's got raster, but those hundreds of TTL chips ju


  • 50 years from now, there'll be a carefully preserved PC in a museum, and they'll spend hours trying to figure out why
    their Windows display crashes after a few hours, not relising that this is a normal feature of the OS :)

    -- Jim.

Slashdot Top Deals

Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.

Close