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

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, @11:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @11:14PM (#304933)

    They have a port for an external monitor. I wonder whether power could be saved by hooking up an LED-backlit display. Presumably the backlights on these are fluorescent, and the built-in display is rather small. What's more, it's monochrome, which achieves the same brightness with less intense backlighting, in comparison to a colour LCD (wasting half of the light, rather than five-sixths).

    The processor in these is an 80C88, the CMOS version of the 8088. Intersil's version [intersil.com] uses a maximum 10mA/MHz and these run at 4.77 MHz. With a 5 V supply, that comes to less than a quarter of a watt.

    These have no hard drive; instead they have MS-DOS in a ROM. Sounds pretty energy-efficient to me.

    These are laptop computers, intended to run off the built-in Ni-Cd battery. Those batteries have a lower energy density and specific energy (energy per unit mass) than lithium-ion. I'm sure that energy consumption was given careful thought in their design.