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.
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(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday February 15 2016, @09:58PM
There is always a risk, even with something completely new. How do you know the manufacturer of your brand new shiny won't run themselves in to the ground tomorrow, rendering it more or less a useless brick? It happens.
If they have kept an unsupported (not necessarily even old) piece of equipment running with no spares parts, no failover, no one knowledgeable in the system, no emergency migration plan, or no one else to call, then they are asking for big trouble.
On the other hand if they take the responsibility themselves to do all of that and periodically re-evaluate the cost vs benefit of moving to something completely different, then such risks can easily be minimized.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday February 15 2016, @10:27PM
That's why you do burn in tests on them and avoid buying proprietary crap when you can avoid doing so.