Posted on 10/01/2016 11:04:05 AM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
Apples Phil Schiller thinks its sad that people use 5-year-old computers. Well, Phil, theres an auto repair shop in Poland thats going to send you spiraling into a long depression.
Why? Because one of the computers theyre using on a day-to-day basis is a Commodore 64, and I dont mean one of the slick nostalgic remakes. Im talking about a classically beautiful beige C64 and its whirring, clunking 5.25″ floppy disk drive.
Its been there for more than 25 years. See, not everyone finds the idea of using an old computer sad. Some, like the mechanics at this shop in Gdansk, treat their hardware like a trusted member of their team. Clearly this Commodore 64 has been pulling its weight for the past 25 years, or the shop wouldve found a different system to help them balance driveshafts.
As the old saying goes, if it aint broke, dont fix it and this C64 seems determined to not break. According to the woman who originally posted this photo to a retro computing group, the computer has shrugged off plenty of abuse over the years. Its been soaked by rain coming in a nearby open window and most likely shat on by birds.
(Excerpt) Read more at geek.com ...
Like I said in post 47, I’m toast.
5.56mm
My dad’s first business computer was a Trs80 with the 8 inch floppy drive from the mid 1980’s. It hasn’t been used in 20+ yrs. A couple of yrs ago he ran across it in storage and plugged it in and flipped the switch, on it came whirling and grinding, worked like it did when he shut it off decades ago.
And it was a beast compared to my Timex Sinclair. (Even with the 16K expansion pack.)
My mother’s proudest bargain shopping moment was buying TI99 at the base eschange for 99 dollars and it had a 100 dollar mail in rebate....she said “someone paid us a dollar to bring this computer home”
Loved loading programs like the knock off D and D game onto the TI99 with a cassette tape.
Wirrr click click wee aww!!!
LOL! Greta article! I’m going to send this to my sister in Poland that uses nothing but Apple products.
I loved the Commodore 64. It was the first computer I used to get online or what they called BBS systems.
The movie War Games is what inspired me to like computers.
I remember playing Oregon Trail on one of those when I was in 3rd grade.
It’s worth a LOT of money on e-bay these days. SELL NOW!
A Raspberry Pi would run rings around this.
The latest RPi3 has a 1GHz CPU. It's actually 64-bit, but there's only one distribution that I know about that will run it in that mode. Raspian (a derivative of Debian) is still 32-bit.
The C-64 had a 1-MHz CPU. No, that's not a typo -- it was a full 3 orders of magnitude slower than the RPi 3. And, it was an 8-bit processor. With no floating point.
The RPI3 also has WiFi, USB, HDMI, and a number of other capabilities that didn't even exist when the C-64 was built.
Missing Novell server discovered after four years
No one noticed for four years, until they did a network audit. The server ran fine all that time.
There's also the 200 MHz homebuilt Pentium server than ran for almost 19 years:
Server retired after 18 years and ten months beat that, readers!
Like I said, “The good old days”. But, they are long gone, now.
This is a hardware requirement similar to my machine shop. I have 15 year old computers running a CMM and a few more feeding my CNC machines. When people bash me for using old XP or even 98 machines I always tell them, “feel free to buy me new software, CNC machines, and a new CMM, and then I’ll buy a new computer.”
They are using this on a drive shaft balancer. A signal is a signal regardless. Good on them.
And he can get cheap replacements if it goes bad.
Where does he get data on newer vehicles
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