6 ms·
Man discovers 30 year old Apple computer still in working order
- andrewstuart 8y agoKinda weird that this is CNN news. There's lots of old computers in working order.
- grzm 8y agoThere are many potentially interesting discussions around this story. Just off the top of my head: the resilience of old hardware, the joy of rediscovering something previously forgotten, old computer games. Let's not make this about CNN's editorial choices (human interest stories have been a thing for a long time) or whether or not this is news. After all, you submitted it.
- adrianmonk 8y agoIt's a reasonable topic to write a story about. However, CNN could have chosen a much better headline, one that doesn't make it sound like a 30-year old computer that still works as some kind of oddity.
- grzm 8y agoYeah, it's a challenge. We as readers (and HN participants) need to rise to it and do better than resort to knee-jerk reactions. Without excusing the behavior, CNN (and other online publications) are in a tough spot: so much of their revenue relies on eyeballs and clicks on ads, so the incentive to write headlines that drive those metrics, which is often in opposition to writing more sober, descriptive headlines. We complain about click-bait, refuse to pay subscriptions, complain about the quality of journalism which costs money to produce, often react only to the headline, sometimes click anyway. Regardless of what CNN does, we can't abdicate our role and responsibility in the relationship, both with the media, and here on HN.
- joegahona 8y agoThey barely wrote about it though. It's a bunch of embedded tweets and an unrelated, generic video about the history of Apple at the top. The body copy of the article is copied quotes from the tweets and wikipedia-esque information about Apple.
- eecsninja 8y agoI can forgive CNN for writing this article but I can't get over the glaring grammatical error in the second paragraph: > and to his surprised it still turned on. Who the hell does proofreading at CNN??
- calgoo 8y agoYea I agree that the headline was a bit off. I was expecting that he found one switched on, having been running for 30+ years in a closet at the university or something along those lines. That he found one in the box in his attic and that it works is not that amazing.
- iancmceachern 8y agoOr cars. I think it's even more amazing that a 30 year old (or much older) car could still work well. Lots going on there.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago+1. Just have a look at the retrocomputing community.
- black-tea 8y agoI'm sure Apple paid them well for the advertisement.
- Dahoon 8y ago30 years ago was 1989. The Commodore 64 is older then that!
- sys_64738 8y agoYep. I have a 37yo working Commodore 64 here and I didn't get any CNN story for it.
- joezydeco 8y agoI got a Mac SE (circa 1987) that still boots. Can I get it on CNN?
- savrajsingh 8y agoMe too!
- bdcravens 8y agoWas it your parents' computer that you used as a child?
- joezydeco 8y agoNo, I flipped burgers all summer to save up $1,895 and then faked my way into the Apple Developer Program to get the 50% hardware discount. I took the Mac to college with me that fall and used it for almost everything while earning my CS degree. I was still getting WWDC invites for a decade after that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DubiousPusher 8y agoThis is like 85% of the way to an Onion headline.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Steko 8y agoI love that the saved game immediately brought up Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and DENNIS
- mahomedalid 8y agoBut seriously, what do you think is more resilient? new or old hardware? do my laptop will continue working in 30 years without maintenance?
- dwighttk 8y agoSince it has an ssd I could see mine working in 24 years when it is 30 years old.
- vardump 8y agoDo you have any particular reason to believe so? I think spinning rust is more likely to survive than electrical charges in tiny cells. SSDs require power at least once per 1-3 years or otherwise they can lose the stored data. If SSD loses critical housekeeping data, it might never work again.
- alister 8y ago> SSDs require power at least once per 1-3 years or otherwise they can lose the stored data. This information needs to be better known. I assumed--and I think many people would assume--that SSDs would be an excellent medium for long term backups. Wikipedia confirms that SSDs aren’t good for long term storage: "If left without power, worn out SSDs typically start to lose data after about one to two years in storage, depending on temperature. New drives are supposed to retain data for about ten years."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_with_other_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_w...
- dwighttk 8y agogood to know
- vardump 8y ago> do my laptop will continue working in 30 years without maintenance? Probably not, but same is often true for old computers. Old hardware is easier to maintain. You can recap them, replace the failed memory chips and even fix cracks in the PCB by just running some extra wires. You can do same to current modern computers as well, but it's nowhere near as easy.
- luckman212 8y agoIt's actually quite a touching story! Among other things, this guy found a letter[0] that his late father had written to him on that Apple //e when he was 11 years old and away at summer camp. [0] https://t.co/Aog3MiSnXN https://t.co/Aog3MiSnXN
- droithomme 8y agoIt's impressive that those 5.25" floppy disks are still good. Most of my 3.5" ones bit the dust long ago, along with nearly all my CD-Rs.
- ido 8y ago5.25" were always more durable than the 1.44mb 3.5" ones. I used an '87-vintage PC XT clone till I got a Pentium in '95 & kept the old computer in a closet. When I booted it up a few years later all my 5.25" still worked where as brand new 3.5" ones would be a good bet to not be readable even after a single rewrite.
- jki275 8y agoI recently found a stack of 3.5" floppies from the 90's, about 1/3 of them had errors. I was able to read most of the data from those -- I think I only ran into one that was completely dead.
- system2 8y agoWhy is this even news? Youtube is literally full of hundreds of thousands of similar videos. 30 years old personal machine is not even old. I can't even understand the importance of this story.
- jchw 8y agoYeah, pretty sure you can grab a working unit on eBay for under a hundred. It's cool... but absolutely not notable or newsworthy.
- kgwxd 8y agoIn this case, it's about the contents of the machine, title probably should have made that clear.
- hacym 8y agoIt's also on the front page of CNN... Which editor decided that this was big enough news that it deserved to be on the front page of their site?
- madrox 8y agoI recently cleaned out my closet and found a Nintendo DS, 3DS, and 3DS XL. I hadn't touched them in years. To my surprise, all of them immediately turned on. I guess I'm so used to devices bleeding battery even when "off" that I figured it would be the case here, but not at all. I also found a Gameboy Advance SP with no batteries in it that booted immediately when I put fresh ones in. I think it says a lot that I was surprised by that. I wish more companies built hardware the way Nintendo does.
- nekkoru 8y agoThe Game Boy Advance SP does not take batteries. It has its own, rechargable li-on battery inside. You're probably thinking of the regular Advance.
- throwmeback 8y agoNintendo Switch isn't the most durable device. I attribute this to the sheer complexity of the device - they did what they could to while cutting some corners here and there to make the device affordable. And it's a massive success.
- black-tea 8y agoEven original Gameboys still work fine. To the extent that they're barely worth anything. The only things that seem to fail on Gameboys is the batteries inside many of the cartridges, but it's trivial to replace those (you do lose your saves, though).
- flemming_geir 8y agoFunny; this is my one annoyance with the Switch. If I leave it for a few days I know that it will be dead and I'll need to recharge it.
- zabuni 8y agoI think that the best part is that he still has papers from when he was a kid on floppy disk. He was afraid of not being able to recover them, when the @textfiles symbol was sent out and http://archive.org http://archive.org 's Jason Scott came up to bat. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1097251935453876224 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1097251935453876224 It there is anyone who can recover those files to a modern readable format, even if only in an emulator, it's him. Also, if you have any old Apple II, C64, or other vintage floppies, he's love to archive them. He's always up for copying....that floppy.