Just like the title says. I have a commodore 64, 1702 monitor and 1541 DD that have got to be about 20 years old now. When I fired them up last year for kicks they worked just fine.[sub] (But oh, but how far we have come… hard to believe I spent hours playing Gunship and Flight Simulator II)[/sub]. Also as a hobby collect other old PCs and video game systems.
Can I realistically expect them to work say, 30 or 50 years from now as long as they are kept in a clean, dry and cool enviroment?
Maybe. Electronics components don’t spoil or get moldy, although the electrolyte in capacitors will eventually dry out. This is a problem with large value capacitors (rule of thumb: large = 1µFd or greater). Such capacitors are usually found in the filtering circuits of power supplies, although if you leave the devices off, the power supplies will never get hot and the electrolyte in capacitors will take much longer to dry out. Dirty dc power isn’t the kiss of death for most consumer electronics, but may cause irratic behaviour.
A hobbyist with a soldering iron can replace filter capacitors pretty easily, so if dried-out caps are the only thing preventing something from working right, it’s an easy fix.
The greater danger is corrosion of the circuit boards. This is a real danger if Rupert’s Land is anywhere near the ocean. Sea salt permeates the air coming off the oceans, degrading the integrity of anything that’s not hermetically sealed.
I don’t know what a DD is, but anything that has moving parts (bearings, rotor coils, etc.) like a hard drive may sieze up after many years of inactivity. Some of the lubricating grease from days of yore has, after many years of sitting around, congealed into putty.
Like the U.S. constitution and other vital documents, no matter how well protected they are, their structure will eventually break down at the molecular level under the stress of external forces.
But not in 30 or 50 years.
It makes me sick to think how much I spent on my Commodore 64 and then the Apple IIc and, and, and…
I saw a cartoon that showed a guy walking out of a computer store, all smiles with his new purchase, and the next shop window was a “day-old” computer shop with 95% markdowns. It was funny - and not so funny.
I do not know the hardware-working-shelf-life, but I believe the technological shelf life of a computer is equal to that of a fruit fly.
I’ve got a lot of commodore disks that have developed “bit rot” where the data on them just aint quite what it used to be. The floppy disks themselves may give out on you first. The data on your floppy disks has already exceeded the lifetime it was guaranteed for.
In addition to the electrolytic capacitor problem already mentioned, your eproms can go south on you as well. If I recall correctly the 1541 disk drive had a habit of slamming the head to one side of the unit when it started up just so it knew where the current head placement was. Eventually I believe it can knock itself out of alignement. The good news is that the 1541 has such huge parts in it compared to a modern floppy drive that you can actually work on the thing. I also recall it using a fairly large worm gear to move the head which should be fairly reliable in the long run.
The brick power supply of the original c64 was a royal piece of crap. It ran to hot and often died while the computer was still young. If you have one of the later models or had the early one and replaced it then you will probably be ok.
My c64 died from overuse back then. I replaced it with a c128 which I still have running. There are a rather surprising number of commodore related web sites with complete docs and probably even things like rom images in case your roms do give out on you.
The c64 and 1541 both didn’t have much in the way of cooling (they were designed to be made cheap after all) so you definately want to keep them in a cool place when running them.
Back when i worked for the sat phone company, I found that certain model sat phones (Iridium 9500) tended to not work very well if they were left for periods of weeks with no use. You’d try to make a call with the phone, and it’d fail to connect for about the first thirty tries, after that, it’d work fine, provided you used the phone at least once a day. The newer the phone was, the less likely this was to happen. What caused it, I don’t know.
I think your software is more vulnerable than your hardware. Magnetic media only last a couple of decades. Electronic components in storage last quite a while.
As for Tuckerfan’s phones, is it possilble the older units had bugs in the firmware? (Or FPGA, or whatever those phones use)
I wish I could find a cite, but I think I am write in recalling that transistors will not last forever. The impurities with which the semiconductors are doped slowly migrate. This places an absolute limit on the life of electronic devices that use transistors.
So, if a space probe was built to take a very long trip to the nearest star - it probably would not be working by the time it got there.
So, if I understand correctly:
There is a pretty good chance the “systems” themselves will still work 20-30 years from now, but there is a good chance the software won’t and possibly moving parts.
Thanks.
Dunno. The software in the phones was updated to the latest version and the phones had been checked over by Motorola to verify that they functioned. I don’t know what their testing methods were, but I tested the phones by taking the phones outside and calling my cell phone with them. If my cell phone rang, it was assumed that the sat phone worked.
Yes, I think there is a certain amount of time for them, the manf 's actually have coined a phrase for it, “Planned obsolesce”…
That way they know how long to keep parts for things. I think that its 7 years for vcrs, 15 years for cars, but don’t quote me, those are old.
Handy, being obsolete doesn’t mean it doesn’t work anymore. Its just “old”, outdated and not really used anymore because newer units to the job better/easier. Kind of like a rotary telephone or circa 1984 VHS VCR. Sure, they may break down because of their age, but they’re not breaking down because they are simply obsolete.
Ozone corrodes component legs such as voltage regulators and transistors.
Over time these become brittle and break off, you could reasonably expect 20 years in an envirnment where it is fairly dry, and the temperature and humidity are are not too high.
In countries where this is not so, some electronic items that have a good deal of stress on tier components, might last as little as five years of less, and salty air can finsih tvs and the like in less than a year.
Military specs often require that solders are silver based and that circuit boards are gold plated, especially the edge connectors as these are the main points of weakness.
As for surface mount stuff such as in gameboys, thise things don’t get the chance to become old, they get broken quite rapidly, but since they use low voltages I’d imagine they would last many years.
I have friends who are still using Amigas, they go to junk sales to get bits and pieces, if it doesn’t work the cost is so low that it doesn’t matter, but my guess is that at least half of it is duff, and the reasons are not obvious, which brings it down to component failure.
Thank you!
2 years or so ago, I couldn’t read any of my C64 disks. I wasn’t which had suddenly gone bad-ally my disks, all my drives, all my drive to keyboard cables, or all my C64’s.
I’ve been afraid to find out. What if all those disks were lost forever?
But this thread, and your post in particular have given me hope. I now suspect that the 1541 I’d been using had head problems. This knocked the disks I used our of alignment(It’s happened before. I once had a 3.5" pc drive that worked normally, except when writing disks. Due to the head being out of alignment, disks written by that drive could not be read by any other. They worked fine in that one drive though).
I used to align the head in the 1541 every year or so myself. It was a very simple procedure. If memory serves, I used the monitor as a strobe and there was actually a tool built into it that aided with alignment. There is a large enough community on the net that surely there must be instructions on how to do it somewhere.
Thank you. Aligning the drive head is now #1 on my list of Commodore projects.
#2-Get my pc 5.25" drive to read C64 disks.
#3-Make a working laptop mounted in a C64 casing. (I don't know whether I should just have the casing open to reveal a standard laptop or go for the more difficult, yet far more rewarding, task of mounting boards and ports in the C64. I prefer the latter. There should be enough openings to accommodate conversion. Don't know how to handle the LCD display though.
#4-Use my C64's to map the human genome.
#5-Use the C64 to create cold fusion
#6-(This one requires the cassete drive, 2 joysticks, and the kaola pad.) Reanimation of the dead.