Hardware that shouldn't work - but it does...

[electricdawn]

Hi, folks.

Since I (politely) got told to not help junking up the introductions thread, I'm more than happy to oblige and start a new discussion here:

Have you seen hardware (and maybe even have pictures of it) that under the circumstances you've witnessed it should NOT be able to operate, but still does?

Around the turn of the 80's to 90's I worked for a computer service that serviced (even at that time) old IBM PC's (you know the 8088, 640KB, two 320KB floppy type). My operating area was mostly office buildings, and old steel mills around Saarbrücken. I one time went into an old fabrication hall (I think it was close to being shut down already) where they had a raised office above the ground floor right in the middle of the hall.

They had an ole' IBM PC sitting there which was chugging along just fine. Just a hiccup every once in a while. When I opened the thing I almost got a heart attack. That thing was covered in metal grindings and stuff, like the whole board, the power supply, EVERYTHING.

And it was still working. Getting a bit long in the tooth, took a while to boot, but it was WORKING. Unfortunately, I didn't had my smart-phone on me (cough), otherwise I've would've taken a boat load of pictures.

I gained new respect for these bricks from there on. Indestructible.

[plasmo]

I had a Z180 design that worked fine, made several copies, and had the design built and verified by others; a year or so later during an unrelated troubleshooting session, I discovered accidentally that Z180 power pin was never hooked up! It was entirely powered through protection diodes all these time.

[barnacle]

I had kind of the opposite effect: a working deep drill robot (it sits on the end of a drill string, three miles or so down, and steers the string so that down there we can hit a six inch target with a six inch drill) was modified to include an external serial port.

Which worked perfectly fine on the bench. And in the lab. And on the heat and cold and vibration testing.

Unfortunately, the permanent Vcc on the resting serial line met the lubricating mud pumped into the hole, and electrolytic corrosion did the rest...

Neil

[SamCoVT]

I went to a concrete plant that loads cement, water, and aggregate into cement trucks. I was supposed to install an update to their QNX-based system that calculated the correct mix based on a bunch of variables. The update came on 3 floppy disks.

The first floppy disk would not insert into the floppy drive. I opened the computer case and the entire motherboard was covered in about 1/4" of cement dust. The floppy disk drive was especially bad - it was the kind that doesn't have the cover over the opening. I took the computer outside and used their compressed air line to blow it out. I blew more dust out of the floppy drive than I though was possible and I made a huge cloud of dust outside (and got it all over myself because that stuff sticks to everything). Fortunately there was no moisture to set the cement, so I was able to get most of it out as just dust.

I put it all back together and was able to use the floppy drive and install the updates. It sounded a bit crunchy when seeking, but it worked. This was a 386 (before they put heatsinks on the CPUs) so at least the CPU wasn't in too much danger of overheating. They were thinking of upgrading the computer, but we recommended they NOT upgrade that computer because of the environment (Pentium IIs were out at the time, but they had/needed heatsinks and fans) and to move the computer into a positive pressure box to keep the dust out in the future.

[barnacle]

SamCoVT wrote:

about 1/4" of cement dust.

(Even more off topic: I left an open-top sports car parked outside my East Finchley flat one night. Some jester came along and tipped what I estimate to have been a 25kg bag of cement into it. Fortunately it didn't rain, but it took some cleaning up... the policeman who came to note the crime had difficulty keeping a straight face.)

Neil