Ive got a timex alarm clock thats been running on the original AA battery for almost 6 years now. Ive used the damn thing as a flashlight, and it still won’t die.
$15 Digital watch, circa 1987. Survived High school, drunken pub crawls, a battery and three replacement wirststraps. The first new battery was last year!
That stupid burgonia plant in high school science class. Dispite our collective efforts of pouring random chemicals in, it just won’t die! Admittedly, it wasn’t growing very well either.
Texas Instruments TI-103 calculator, received as a Christmas present from my aunt in 1986. Despite the fact that I’ve used it regularly for the past 17 years, it still has its original battery. Looks and works as good as new!
The best example I can give is a 1971 Panasonic microwave. It was a triangular shape, and the top/front pulled up. All it had for “features” were a dial and a button. It was the weirdest contraption imaginable, but it was the only microwave I had ever seen until I was about twelve years old. I owned it until '99 when I sold it on ebay for over $100. It still worked like brand new despite years of regular use (and several experiments as a kid). Even though it would take about ten minutes to pop a bag of popcorn, every single kernal would pop.
My Sharp GF-8686 boombox. I bought it in 1981, and it still works like new – even the futuristic, hi-tech, Auto Program Locate Device (APLD), which detects the gaps on the cassette tapes to automatically fast-forward to the start of up to seven subsequent songs. As someone mentioned earlier, the hard part is finding cassette tapes in good enough condition.
It also has shortwave band coverage, which I listen to several times a week. (One product we have more and better of in the last twenty years: radio kooks).
My Toro snowblower from the 60’s. I’m the third owner and I put a new engine on it only 14 years ago. It’s a real deathtrap with exposed belts and chains and no safety interlocks at all but it just refuses to die. I thought that this winter would kill it for sure since we’re on pace for record snowfall but it keeps going.
The motherboard and CPU (200mhz pentuim) from the first computer I ever put together myself. I was a freshmen in college at the time so would’ve been in '96. Now it’s not so much the age but the sheer amount of use and abuse it’s gone through.
When it served as my desktop computer I hauled it around all the time to LAN parties and such, even to work a few times a month for high speed warez downloading (worked on campus, they were cool.) It was constantly being tossed in the trunk of the car, dropped a few times, dropped in the snow a few times (was living in Alaska at the time) and had an unknown amount of soda/coffee/beer spilt on it during this time. After a couple of years of this I upgraded the workstation and put this motherboard in a new case where it became my first ever Linux server. It did that gratefully for a couple years until more upgrades forced it out. For the past two years it’s been running outside of a case, taped to a piece of carboard hiding out on the bottom shelf of my entertainment center doing duty as an MP3 player. It ran without a CPU fan for at least a couple of months when I didn’t realized the fan had siezed. It’s still chugging away despite the dust, poor ventalation and overall horrible operating conditions. The board’s made by Tyan, I forget the exact model.
Well, I dropped my Philips portable CD player from waist height a few months ago. The LCD display is gone, but otherwise it keeps soldiering on. But, it’s only a couple years old at this point.
All the wrist watches I’ve owned in the last few years still work, but I go and get new ones when the bands break. Call me lazy, if you like.
My 20 year old Canon A-1 camera still works just fine. It’s a great camera.
And I just inherited a digital alarm clock/radio from my grandfather’s house. It’s gotta be about 15-20 years old as well. It works great. I like it better than my new one. Only problem is its size.
I have mid-70’s Paslode framing nailer (nail gun) that I still use almost every day. It has probably fired over a million 16 & 8p nails (into more than a few fingers too) since it was new.
A pair of fake leather stilletto boots bought for $9. I wear them all the time, almost daily in winter and plenty in summer (good with pants). They have lasted five years.
A pair of black beaded sandals bought for $1.47 at Target two summers ago. I alternate these with the boots.
Those are the only shoes I ever seem to wear. Both bought becuase they were cheap. Never thought they would last.
[ul]
[li]BDU pants- got 'em for about $15 (used, to start with) to play paintball in (am I the only one that thinks that sounds wrong?) something like 4 years ago. Still going strong, never ripped, torn or faded, and paintball is not exactly easy on the pants…friends have gone through half a dozen pair in the same time.[/li][li]Rolex knockoff- a friend got it for $8 in Europe last summer, it keeps better time than the watch my parents gave me for my 18th B-Day.[/li][li]Refrigerator- my grandparents have a fridge that they got when my mom was 8-ish, so that’d be ~35 years ago. The thing is still going strong, including the freezer part. As far as I know, they’ve never had to do any maintenance on it whatsoever.[/li][/ul]
I lived in an apartment a few years ago that had a natural gas-powered fridge. I don’t know how old it was, but from the looks of it, its immediate predecessor had a big tray in the bottom where the ice man put the ice in.
My wife inherited her grandmother’s vibrator, looked exactly like the kind you see in antique Sears catalogs. Unfortunately, a few years ago it blew up … you heard me right, blew up, with sparks and melted copper spewing everywhere … WHILE IN USE!
I have a Magnavox digital clock radio that is over 23 years old. And it keeps perfect time. I love the thing, as it has a blue readout that’s east on my eyes. I hope I never have to replace it. (my wife, of course, hates it but occasionally she let’s me win one).
I also have a 19 inch color TV that I bought 20 years ago that is still going strong. I’ve never had one problem with it. Amazing.
My final piece of electronic equipment that I’d like to brag about is a large boom box that I bought when I was a kid. It’s at least 25 years old and has spent most of it’s time in the bathroom (I listen to it when I shower). I can’t imagine the corrosion inside the thing, but it still plays. The cassette deck doesn’t work too well, but for music or the traffic report, you can’t beat it. The best part of it is that it’s very thin, so it takes up little space while delivering great sound.
oh, and how could I forget? Anything labeled “Fisher-Price” seems to guarantee that the thing is indestructable.
This might be the first TV post: I have a 1984 19" Toshiba color TV that works perfectly. It can’t get cable channels over channel 50, but then they didn’t have them back then. The remote has been dropped & abused numerous times, yet it still functions flawlessly every day.
Well, they’re not actually mine, but I’ve got to bring it up. At my bank here in town (Bank of America), they’re still using three Apple Macintosh . . . ready . . . 512k’s!!
Those things have to be from about 1985 or '86. They’re the ones with the screen that’s about 4" by 3". I have no idea what they could possibly do with them; they can’t have enough memory to do anything more complex than " 2 + 4 = 6" but I see them looking stuff up on them every time I go in.
I can only hope my ibook lasts half as long.
The Hoover vacuum cleaner that my mother and father won on the Newlywed Game ca. 1968 apparently drew its last breath last summer.
I sent my Matsui portable CD player flying on Saturday, batteries fell out, but still works fine. I’ve had this thing since 1997 and was given it as a present from a friend who bought it at a Jumble Sale (Rummage sale to the Yanks), so it’s probably much older than that. No anti jog function on it.
Oh. My. God! :eek:
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RCA 19" color TV bought in about 1982
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HP 12C calculator from 1985