What's crazy about that is that some of those 6 month systems, which were designed at the time to be a throwaway, just to get by, are still in production 26 years later and causing all kinds of problems.
how old were the systems? And have you ever had to maintain systems that were that many years old that weren't a nightmare to maintain and cost a fortune to fix?
Agreed. It ran for 30 years and hasn't had problems (other than the radio interference issue). Anything that has lasted for 30 years has had nearly every bug worked out or worked around. The only things that survive for 30 years are systems that do the job.
Sounds like their system works. If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced with.
I did the same for a CQRS system. It's been humming away in production for at least 6 years. I've been surprised at how reliable it's been, 0 patch bugs.
Ten years, yep, sounds about right. We're finally getting rid of our last few RHEL6 boxes. It got pretty long in the tooth at the end there, but it never gave me any hassle.
One thing that shouldn't be discounted is survivorship bias. The machines from the 1960s that broke early on aren't around anymore. The only machines from the 1960s that are left are those which last a long time.
It's always impressive to see somebody try to build something that lasts, and succeed. It's even rarer to see such a thing in consumer electronics.
I'm currently sitting in the same room as a Bryston amplifier that, according to it's date code, was manufactured in late 1998. That means it's almost 21 years old and just 1 year off warranty. It's been switched on for most of those 21 years but still works great and has never been serviced. Even more surprisingly, it's not obsolete. It's currently hooked up to a 2018 receiver.
I'd love to see somebody do tear-downs of devices like this and explain how their construction takes longevity into consideration without resorting to the same extremes as NASA (e.g. X-raying caps).
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