Those things must have produced a hell of a lot of waste heat if they could warm an entire school district worth of buildings.
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If it keeps going a bit longer, the programmer will retire. Then it will have worked for longer than they have. Thatās somewhat pleasing
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That sentiment is exactly why we are still running this Windows 3.1 system in our lab.
Truth is we only just recently got approval to upgrade this test station on a Windows 7 machine with LabVIEW.
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If they had used a proper computer from DEC they could have warmed a whole city.
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The car club where Iām a member used an Amiga 500 to operate the door access with a remote keypad. It was retired in 2004 or so. It was still operating perfectly when it was removed and I still have the whole system stashed somewhere. It was replaced because it was feared that it would break down and no-one could fix it.
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For fun I need to dig out the A500 that my parents still have in storage. I really want to see if I can code up and run a chemistry simulation (like something smallā¦ like a calculation on a single water molecule). Though it may need a lot of disks to act as memoryā¦
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My very, very first SysAdmin job was working for a company here in Toronto who sold Amiga-based Video toaster solutions. We had a 10Base-2 network in the office and streamed .MOD files for music. 
My desktop was an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster 4000 and Excalibur card running a 68060. THOSE were the days!
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I thought it was bad we regularly have to work with a system that was last āupgradedā to a new version of OS/2 warp in October '95. I was going to throw it a birthday party if itās still running in 4 months.
Amiga 1000 Price at 1985 release: $1,295
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz
Memory: 256 KB upgradable to 512 KB
Raspberry Pi 1 model A Price at release: $25
CPU: 700 MHz single-core ARM1176JZF-S
Memory: 256MB DDR2 400MHz
So roughly a hundred times more powerful processor, a thousand times more RAM, and 50 times cheaper.
Itās good to live in the future.
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That system was broken the day it was installed.
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wonder if it would save money on electricity costs if you replace it with a modern small PC, maybe even an arduino or a highly modified smartphone ???
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According to this website, the power requirement for an A1000 is:
120V, 90 Watts, 60Hz, 1A nominal
A Raspberry Pi 2 Model B runs about 120 times faster, has 4000 times more RAM, and has a power requirement of 5V at 2A so about 10 watts, so it uses 9 times less 1/9th of the power that an Amiga 1000 uses.
The two amps are there as a maximum power specification, which includes attached USB devices and higher current consumed at peak CPU and peripherals load.
The actual usage is about a quarter-amp, when idle. Power trace of the booting board, sensed on a 1-ohm resistor[1] so 1 mV=1 mA, here:
So thereās some 30 seconds for booting, where a few high-current spikes occur when some things are initialized (todo: correlate with dmesg timestamps), high power fluctuations up to a half-amp until everything starts, then steady state at around 250 mA when the system is idle. (No peripherals attached, no network and screen attached.)
(Donāt trust the trigger position, ignore the counter frequency.)
(The software for controlling the scope and making the screenshots and dumping the raw data to files will be made available soon, or immediately for request if you can handle rough and messy C.)
[1] The 1-ohm sensing resistor is in the buck converter output, between the filtering cap and the feedback pin. This allows for a high voltage drop without affecting the 5V output, which in turn allows for a low scope noise (which is rather atrocious at the highest sensitivities).
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We can still be safe saying that the Raspberry Pi 2 model B+ will use at most 1/9th the power of an Amiga 1000.
The question was whether using a phone or SoC would use less power, and we can definitely say āyes, by a shitton even in the worst-case scenario, with equipment that costs the same as lunch at a decent Chinese placeā
Interesting data though.
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Seriously, I donāt know why everyone doesnāt switch their POS systems over to SoC solutions running windows emulators or just ARM7 software.
Right now Iām supporting IBM 4800-720 and 4800-740 systems which run on Core I3 procs, have 4GiB of RAM, and are awful. Theyāre gross, hard to work with (because of Group Policy lockdown), and we have to call IBM every time thereās a problem at all. The Windows side of things never has a problem, which is nice, but if something goes wrong I have to extensively document what happened, create a ticket for IBM, then follow up every 12 hours until they fix it.
Itās not as bad as our kiosk systems, which are completely locked down, even if I sign in as a local admin, so I canāt even download and install malwarebytes (which is our standard solution for malware scanning since our McAfee ePO deployment wonāt stick on machines that are so locked down), and the kiosks have a grand total of 4GiB of storage and 1GiB of RAM. In fact, the kiosks run on Core i5 procs and are faster than our POSes, but trying to do a scan on them instantly depletes their RAM to 0 and fail. Yet Iām supposed to make sure theyāre ācleanā and have the latest win7 updates, even though they all have 0 bits free. Also, Iām supposed to update their screensavers once a month (thereās about 250 machines to update, and every time I try to script it, it fails, and manually deleting everything I safely can from Sys32 and windows, then uploading the photos takes about 20 minutes per machine, so I pretty much ignore those work orders while bitching to my impotent manager about how itās an impossible task.)
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The last I heard,Whitaker Coal was still using a 64k TRSā80 Color Computer using an rompak that had a custom program that controls the coal loader for the railroad gondas.The system has worked reliably since 1984,when the facility was built.I ought to know,too.I was the programmer and I worked there until 2000.I still know friends that work there and they tell me that the old gray machine is still going strong.
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I know someone whose dad is some kind of cryogenics boffim, and he still uses BBC Micros. Theyāll be prised from his Cold Dead Hands.
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In cryogenics, your hands donāt have to be dead to be cold.
Cryoengineering is the coolest!
+LDoBe: I wonder what the future of the future will be like :).
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