They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

`Sean writes: "Sosik-Hamor Projects has posted an article entitled 'They Don't Make Them Like They Used To' that, with the help of some semiautomatic weapons, documents the durability of old school hardware versus the flimsy cases being used in newer peripherals. The Sun 3/50 came out victorious and was stolen from the trash the next day, probably to be turned into body armor!"

It's not just the cases...

Yep, I totally agree that the cases of hardware (and not just computers - TVs, VCRs etc) are getting less 'sturdy' - but it isn't just the cases.

In the 'good old days', you could buy a TV and it'll still be working 15 years later - now you are lucky if it lasts 7 before something major goes wrong. My old BBC (circa 1983) micro still works - it was in daily constant use for over 10 years with 5 1/4" floppy drive. I have trouble firing up a 1995 PC with harddrive - sometimes it just won't even get past the BIOS boot.

All in the name of economy... *sigh*

On the same vein, the egyptians had the hierographic writings which have lasted over 3,000 years - any 'modern days' records going to last that long? Nope..

Discuss: Have we really progressed?

Richy C. [beebware.com]
--

ISP's with guns

You do realize that his ISP is going to probably choke or shoot him with his own gun over the slashdotting their server is about to recieve. Especially as it is in norway. (And given the probably very high per-megabyte bandwidth charge.)

May I suggest a mirror? Quickly

Can you say wearable PC

That gives a whole new sense to wearable PC's. The PC that can save your life when being shot.

Nothing new ...

What what I understand, engineers aim for a minimum operational life of 10,000 hours which equate to just over one year of continuous use. When the price points become fixed, then all you can alter are the invisible quality aspects (e.g. smaller hamburgers, larger packaging, higher risk failure). Like any good industrialist and profit seeking capitalist, it is in their interest to have everything fail at the right time (planned obsolescence) just in time for their new upgrades and "bigger/better/faster" range to come out. Henry Ford used to send his engineers scrounging through dumps to find out what parts survived ... and when he discovered cottler pins holding wheels together he reduced the quality of the metal. Remember that in a manufacturing mindset, you only make a profit on the "First Sale" (see previous /. articles on why Microsoft is discouraging resale through EBay). Once hooked and addicted, they calculate the potential lifetime value of each customer and software price yields (ie how much they can screw them and have them coming back for more).

Unfortunately there's not much you can do ... custom software is still expensive (think 100K/year x #team of hackers) and mass produced software (<$500) creates their own scale of economy (training, pool of experts, etc). You can see how after a while one company dominates a particular ecological niche, Cisco (TCP/IP routing), SGI (OpenGL), AutoCAD (design), Adobe (publishing), high-end databases (Oracle) thus rewarding specialisation and persistance. Without lure of supernormal profits, would you have these companies existing to bribe their option hungry programmers? Let's have a rough look at the economics, it takes say 3 years and a team of 20-30 engineers at $100K/year plus 33% operational overhead, ie a minimum cost of $10M you need to recover from software sales. At an average sale price of $50, you need minimum 2 million copies just to break even and steady state revenue of $3-4M/year. Assuming you are only targetting 1st world countries (starving peasants don't exactly put software at top of their Xmas list) you've got an uphill battle to convince others you're worthwhile keeping for the long-term, not to mention on-going support and hand-holding. Maybe those Indian programmers are not such a bad idea after all.

We might whinge at the formula movies and crappy software but we only get what we pay for. The demand for high quality high reliability software (e.g. FAA flight control) is only a select market and if the average purchaser is not interested in paying extra for a higher mean-time-between failure (given today's disposable society) then you are just wasting scarce programmer resources. Perhaps OpenSource software could set a new standard but documenting and independently validating a set of 3 software metrics

- mean time between failure (reliability)
- total cost to repair/replace (quality)
- acceleration of learning curve (difficulty)

This should sort out the sheep from the goats.

LL

Hardware abuse!

From what I gathered reading the article, the Sun and the Xterm were still alive when shot.

Sacrilege!

Putting down broken hardware is one thing, but killing still working Unix hardware boarders on blasphemey!

May their weapons jam and their clip's springs weaken!

Re:This is interesting,

I *ONLY* wear wool from Venusian sheep. Nothing less will do, frankly.


Bad Mojo [rps.net]

Be honest ....

Even the most ultra-liberal, pinko, gun-confiscating, bleeding heart liberal has wanted to do this at one time or another.

Reminds me of a story from the Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s. A bunch of student radicals took over the computer center at a large university. If their demands were not met, they would Destroy the Computer, symbol of opression. Admin ignored them. So they tried.

This was a big IBM mainframe. The radicals discovered a number of interesting facts:

• The computer center staff had shut the computer down and thoughtfully removed anything that looked like a tool.
  
• They had cut power to the computer from outside the computer center.
  
• All the cases require a special tool to open. The radicals had maybe a screwdriver.
  
• You need a floor sucker to get to any of the cables under the raised floor. The radicals didn't have one.
  
• Hitting the cases with a chair accomplishes nothing. Heavy steel.
  
• Monitors are *very* hard to break.
  
• The only thing you can damage with a pocket knife is the upholstry on the operator's chair.
  
• Setting a fire in the computer room was more dangerous to them than it was to the computer.
  

However, they did a real job on the console keyboard.

That's nothing!

A few years ago, the IRA used to have fun blowing up parts of the City of London, trying to cause as much chaos as possible.

One of my collegues had to attend the clean-up operation of one such attack at a large financial institution, roughly 7-8 years ago. This company used Banyan CNS servers, which were huge 386 or 486 ISA machines with integrated UPS. The case consisted of an aluminimum frame with removable side panels and top. Due to the integrated UPS, they had to be strong.

This site had suffered severe structural damage during the attack, so much so that at least 2 of these servers were acting as supports for the rest of the building. What's more, they still worked after the event, although a bit dusty.

Can anyone beat that..

Hayes Transet 1000 Durability Testing

I don't know how many of you are actually old enough to remember when: A) Hayes Microcomputer was still in business, and; B) manufactured a device called a Transet 1000.

This was one of Dennis' brilliant brain-childs that was basically a marketing flop. It was supposed to be a print buffer (which it did an OK job at), a mailbox (before real internet-type e-mail), and a couple of other things we never were really clear on.

After the product was launched, all the developers were issued a personal Transet. There were those who worked in the project that thought it was a dumb idea to begin with, and decided to make a point about it.

The actual Hayes employee, whom I'll call Chuck, another Hayes employee (not involved in the project, but working there at the time), and myself (not a Hayes employee until many years later), took said Transet 1000 out the ol' shooting range in Marietta, named aptly enough "The Bullet Stop".

Diversion
The Bullet Stop was owned by Paul LaVista, an arms dealer and active mercenary. You may remember him being in the news about 6-7 years ago for shooting himself, them claiming to find a bomb in his Mercedes. All part of an attempt to divert attention of the ever-viligant IRS for not paying his taxes. (Doesn't everyone pay cash for their Stinger missles?). The first time we walked in there was with two 25lb (that's about 46 kilos) blocks of ice. Paul looked at us and said "You're sick puppies! I'd like to pop a couple of those!" That netted us two free magazines for the H&K MP5-A. We preceded to spend about $600, renting every dang weapon that was semi or full-auto in the place. The rule from then on was "Anything that's already dead, fits through the front door, and isn't in a Sherwin-Williams can"
/Diversion

After removing the EPROM from the Transet (those were expensive then, 128K x 8, and as hardware hackers, we coveted any such useful hardware) we clipped the Transet into the target clamp, ran it out about 30 feet, and proceeded to try to kill it.

In those days, Hayes modems, Transets and Chronographs (a collectors item, fetching as much as $300 in the right market, these days. I have 15 of them!) came in very nice .125 aluminum cases. This makes for fairly effective PCB armor. We unloaded .30 cal from an M1 carbine, .45 ACP from a stainless Colt M1911A (with Pachmyre grips, Millet sites, ported and polished, and a 2.2lb trigger job), 9mm (from god-knows-what), and last but not least, a few 12 gauge shotgun slugs. The slugs ripped it out of the carrier, but never penetrated the case. The .45 and 9mm went deep, but not all the way through. The .30 cal did the most damage, actually punching through far enough to smash the 68008 CPU (it being ceramic made it particularly brittle).

All in all, it was an enjoyable afternoon spent killing a Transet, bowling pins, and few other odds-and-ends. But it didn't quite end there...

Chuck decided that rather than just kill a Transet, we (he) should make a point with it. It was placed on Dennis' desk, before Dennis arrived. Upon find a representative of his beloved project mercilessly slaughtered, he became a tad irate. Word is he never found out who dunnit, but many references were made, and comments such as "A project like that might wind up like a Transet" were occasionally heard. I wish we still had that ol' Transet. It's a bit of Hayes history now...

Other things we shot up: A running Nova 1200 (with 48K of core memory), a self-propelled vacuum cleaner (fun), platters from disc-packs (they spark when a high speed round goes through them), vinyl records (boring), and numerous other bits of obsolete technology.

One word of warning: Next to the Bullet Stop was a bar called the Pew-n-Brew. It's very important to get the order correct: Go shooting, *then* go drinking. One of establishments gets a little annoyed if you get these reversed.