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An 18yo Server? Meh. Try Dozens of Thirty Year-Old Laptops Still Used 24/7

posted by on Monday February 15 2016, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the exemplary-mtbf dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes in with a an article from El Reg, reporting on some very old hardware still in use:

The can of worms we opened when we learned of the server switched off after eighteen years and ten months' service is still wriggling, as a reader has contacted us to tell of nearly 30-year-old laptops still in service.

Reader "Holrum" says he has "a couple dozen Toshiba T1000 laptops from the mid [1980s] still fully functional (including floppy drives)".

The T1000 was introduced in 1987. [...] The machine was one of the very first computers to use a clamshell form factor. [...] It also offered a rather archaic LCD display, as illustrated.

[...]The machine ran MS-DOS 2.11 on a ROM [and] came with a colossal 512kB of RAM [...] and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.

Holrum says the T1000s are taken offline every few years for just the few minutes required to replace the NiCad batteries and give them a clean before they are returned to duty as process monitoring terminals.

Previous: Beat This: Server Retired After 18 Years and 10 Months

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:23PM (#304771)

    As someone who's just migrating a 15+-year old server to a RasPi, I sure ain't gonna actually decomission the old one and slot the new one in its place until its completely proved its stability. Almost no Pi has been seen to be able to sustain five-nines availability and year-long uptimes, which is what I'll be demanding of it. No Pi has been shown to demonstrate 20+-year longevity. The tech in those 20+-year old machines is actually *simpler* than what you're proposing as a replacement. All of these things imply there's a positive risk to the change. I just hope my 15+-year old server reaches its 16th birthday until the Pi has done the equivalent job on a test network for at least 6 months. And that's why my servers, year after year, achieve five nines, and only once in the last decade has the failure to achieve that been anything which could be considered my fault given that I can't simply increase my budget by a factor of ten to get better protection from the faults of others.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:52PM (#304786)
    I'd _prepare_ to replace them but not replace them till forced to. Even after testing there are likely to be bugs for edge cases.

    If possible I'd try to use a VM or dosbox to avoid rewriting logic- the issue would be the hardware interfaces, there might be timing errors/differences with the replacements.

  • (Score: 2) by dmbasso on Tuesday February 16 2016, @05:10AM

    by dmbasso (3237) on Tuesday February 16 2016, @05:10AM (#305056)

    Linux raspi 3.18.5+ #744 PREEMPT Fri Jan 30 18:19:07 GMT 2015 armv6l
    Last login: Sat Feb 13 06:48:59 2016 from xxxxxx
    dmbasso@raspi ~ $ uptime
      05:08:36 up 370 days, 5:56, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.05

    Used as secondary DNS server and MX.

    --
    `echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com