

In which I switch on a 30 year old computer and it just works - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-old.html

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jacquesm
You know, the chances of an old 8 bitter firing up on the first try and
loading its files from tape somehow does not surprise me. But you may want to
worry a bit about the electrolytic capacitors, they tend to dry out over time.

If you did the same with a 15 year old 486 and read a bunch of 3.5" floppies
(or worse, zip disks) I would be much more impressed :)

Eletronics back then were built to last, and the size of an individual bit on
a medium from those days was large enough to withstand decay by auto-
demagnetization better than anything new. Lucky you did not have any 'copy
through' effects on the tape, that's the biggest killer trying to read old
tapes.

~~~
jgrahamc
Hmm. I have in front of me a Maxell MF 2HD 3.5" floppy drive with the
following written it:

THESIS & PAPERS 15 FEBRUARY 1996 ZIP FORMAT / DOS

Externally it looks in good condition, but it's been stored in a box of other
junk all that time. Tomorrow I'll take it to work and shove it in one of the
machines there that still has a floppy drive and see if it's readable.

~~~
jacquesm
Neat :) 13 years. I'd bet they'd work with some errors. Mostly dependant on
the mechanical condition of the floppies, the 3.5" are usually pretty good
because of the hard case.

I still have one of the first bernoulli 10MB removables here, I wonder how
good they would fare. Not much point to try to find an adaptec 1542 just to
satisfy my curiosity though.

You mention a bbc micro somewhere, do you still have that one ? (elite ???)

~~~
jgrahamc
I have a BBC Micro Model B in working order with the associated tape player
and a variety of ROMs. I also have some 8" disks with my code on them which
was for the Research Machines 380Z (code written for CP/M and MP/M)

~~~
jacquesm
Wow... Better hold on to that one very carefully.

That's one of the nicest computers there ever was to start learning on. The
lowest barrier to entry and some of the best books.

My 'growth path' was KIM-1, TRS-80 pocket, then the bigger trs stuff, then an
english color computer clone called the Dragon 32, then a beeb, Atari ST and
from then on IBM pc's.

At some point a company that I was partner in also had a PDP 11 but we did not
do too much with it because of the power requirements, that was my first unix
experience.

------
pmichaud
I wonder if the "designed to fail" trend will get worse or reverse in the
coming years?

~~~
Tangurena
No, And my reason is because of the switch to lead-free solders. Lead-free
solders aren't anywhere near as reliable as lead-based solders. Marketing
folks claim they are. Reliability engineers can demonstrate that they aren't.

------
hachiya
I found this pretty impressive:

> Then I did the real test. After poking around and finding a tape of my

> old BASIC programs I typed LOAD again and explored the tape. 30 years on

> all the programs loaded from tape just fine and executed. I was able to

> spend a happy few hours playing character-based games that I wrote.

That his programs loaded after 30 years on a cassette tape makes some of those
cheap flaky CDs' lifespans look pretty bad.

~~~
zokier
I'm quite certain that if you take highest quality CD-R medium (he mentions
that he had used highest quality tapes), burn it carefully, and then store it
away from sun, excess heat or humidity, it will last 30 years.

Wouldn't say same for the drive used though, and that's where the real problem
kicks in.

------
GeneralMaximus
Modern PCs are pretty durable, IMO. Of course, if you go out and try to build
a sub-$1000 PC, it's going to fail sooner or later. Invest in a durable case,
a solid power supply and plenty of fans for cooling. I've found cheap DVD+RW
drives fail very often, so invest in something higher quality than your $30
DVD+RW drive. I've never had a hard disk fail, but my motherboard has failed
me several times. Now I have a Gigabit "gaming" motherboard (even though I'm
not much of a gamer) that has lasted for quite some time.

I'm not sure how much LCD monitors last, but CRTs are known to work well for
very long periods of time. I'm sure nobody wants CRTs these days, but I
thought this fact was worth pointing out.

Oh, and I hear Apple's hardware is pretty good. In one year of heavy use, my
MacBook has never _ever_ failed me even once. This, of course, depends on how
you handle your laptop. Mine never goes out of the house, so it's never
exposed to shocks, dust or intense heat.

My point is, with a bit of thought, it's possible to build a PC that can last
for quite some time.

------
ruslan
I recently found a GoldStar cassette tape with my Atari hacks (in BASIC and in
6502C machine code) back from elder days of 1988-89. Externally and visually
the tape is in normal condition, no chipouts of the ferromagnetic layer. Now
to try it I need an Atari 800, anyone can send me one with a tape recorder ?
;-)

~~~
pronoiac
You could probably get the data with wav2cas -
<http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html>

~~~
ruslan
Oh my!!! Long ago I thought of possibility to create such converter, but did
not know someone already implemented it. This is so cool, thanks for the link.

~~~
pronoiac
I almost linked blueprints or specs instead. I've been thinking about this
sort of hardware emulation since PixelVision cameras came up elsewhere months
ago - they recorded black & white video on audiocassettes.

------
teeja
Luckily for the computer cassette tapes, the FSK'ed bits lie way down in the
sound spectrum, IIRC circa 1000 Hz.

I recently digitized some old favorite audio cassette dubs (TDK SA, most made
on really good gear) and apart from atrocious wow-and-flutter, the high-end
was completely gone on most, down to about 8K anyway.

Tape may still be the safest bet to store data long-term. I've read recently
that (burned) CD's over 10 years old are getting iffy. Whereas people are
still recovering NASA data off tapes made 45 years ago.

------
zandorg
Oh I have a great anecdote about my Sharp MZ-700.

I got into the habit of loading up games then entering the debug console and
poking in random points in memory. As they say: It's ROM, you can't break it!

But I broke it! I rebooted and found the caps lock in the debug console was
broken (but did still work in BASIC). caps lock never worked again in the
debug console.

I think it's pretty bizarre to accidentally rewrite a ROM chip, but amusing
too.

~~~
jgrahamc
When you say "Caps Lock" are you referring to the ALPHA key? I don't recall
there being a Caps Lock on that machine.

Of course, it's entirely possible that writing to the ROM was decoded
separately and used for some control signals. The Apple ][ I believe did some
interesting address decoding to get control signals from the address bus.

Looking at the memory map for the MZ-700 it appears that it implemented bank
switching so that the ROM could be paged in or out and replaced with the video
RAM and I/O ports. Some of those I/O ports are connected to the keyboard.

<http://www.sharpmz.org/mz-700/coremain.htm#banksw>

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zandorg
I have bad memories of my Sharp MZ-700. The problem? For one, the display
wasn't bitmapped, it had a fixed character display with just 2 256-letter
fonts. Any game had to make good use of these fonts - like Angband.

Further, there were virtually no games for it.

When I got a Commodore 64 for my birthday, I was very glad to ditch the Sharp
and enjoy a REAL computer.

------
iuguy
I still use my 27 year old Sinclair ZX Spectrum now and again. Last year we
used my CDTV as the living room CD player for 6 months as we didn't want to
buy a new stereo or stereo speakers (my wife blew them).

------
RyanMcGreal
I have a Compaq Deskpro Portable from the mid-1980s that still boots.
autoexec.bat ftw!

------
messel
The rate of change of technology has been "adopted" by hardware designers, now
with a considerate built in replacement time. That way we don't forget its
time to upgrade again. Moore's Law was really gathering momentum/social
acceptance in the mid 70s.

~~~
jacquesm
Moores law gathering social acceptance ? Moores law is a derivative law, not
one that is to be followed by anybody.

It's more of an observation than a 'law' as such.

In its simplest form it says 'technology gets cheaper, smaller and faster over
time', there is nothing you can do about it, it will happen. Social acceptance
and momentum don't enter in to it, it either is like that, or it isn't.

Hardware designers do the very best they can, if they could they would prove
GM wrong whenever they could, but they can only work so hard and the market is
only willing to pay a certain premium for a certain improvement in speed/size
and so on. After the early adopters have paid the way the tech becomes
mainstream, the price drops and the cycle repeats (it really is executed
several times in parallel with staggered outputs, one 'thread' for every big
chip manufacturer, that's where all the leapfrogging comes from).

This is about as market driven a process as you could possibly find on planet
earth.

~~~
messel
I read a great post by Kevin Kelly on the history of Moore's law that
contradicts this opinion. The standards hardware engineers worked towards were
based on assumptions of a new transistor density, and the assumptions
invariably became self predicting prophecies. Achievements of anything less
than Moore's law improvement weren't acceptable! I'll dig up the link if you
can't find it.

