The computer I’m using right now is getting on for 20 years old now. I’ve upgraded a few bits over the years, but like my grandfather’s axe, it’s still the same one.
And once you have a seventh the same guy chases you, but with a much more boring haircut, and he works for a criminal profiling agency (bonus, though, he sometimes brings Paget Brewster!)
1 Like
My firewall is a Cyrix 686 CPU, which I got for free including a motherboard Back Then. The CPU fan is long gone, but was hot-swap replaced with a free-standing bigger slower fan blowing at the heatsink from side. The case and power supply is from an ancient East-European PP-06, a PC-XT clone. So if we count the case/PSU, it is certainly 20+ years old. Maybe 30. I used it for quite some time before retiring it and rebuilding it with a new motherboard. It’s scheduled for replacement with a Raspberry Pi based one, with USB network cards, but that will take some more time to implement.
Weird is, old components tend to last for WAY longer than new components. Maybe because back they they did not know how to make the stuff cheap, so they had to make it good.
1 Like
You’re talking like there’s some essential part, some mechanical soul, that can’t be replaced and must wear out eventually, but there’s not.
I’ve got documents on my hard drive that have been continuously accessible for 20 years and more. The media that holds them, and the hardware that surrounds it, has changed many times, but with a little care, data is eternal.
Yeah, no system is perfect. There’s always the outside chance of some catastrophic failure or other destroying all your carefully-maintained hardware. How is that any worse than flesh?
I still think the market forces will be far more deadly then mere entropy. If you’re not Paris Hilton, there’s simply no profit in making you live forever.
1 Like
That’s why DIY is for. You can make pretty good parts on a decades old lathe; especially those ancient cast-iron-frame German ones, some still bearing a swastika on the casting, seem to be able to last forever. (…waaaant…) And manual ones can be retrofitted to CNC. The stepper motors, with some care, also last virtually forever. Same for milling machines and other rigs.
Potential problems are with the electronics. But look at the game emulators; decades old circuits don’t have to be kept alive in a physical form when they can be emulated on new ones.
Then there are the potential future approaches to electronics: self-assembled nanoparticles (3d memories, FPGA arrays?), molecular electronics, spintronics, plasmonics… these can get tricky. But then, there will have to be machines for making these, and machines for making machines, and given time you can backtrack these all the way back to the old German cast-iron ones.
I dunno, there’s a reason medicine is such a huge industry. A little bit of money from a lot of people goes a long way, plus you get government and insurance money.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
