I wonder how many still going
There is always a healthy stock of 48k rubber keyed speccys on eBay. However whats the guess on the amount world wide that are still working/used?
+1 here :-)
+1 here :-)
Post edited by hedge on
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Or, for that matter, how the life expectancy of 1980s "home micros" compares to modern PCs?
I know modern games consoles have a poor working longevity because of their disc-drives which don't last very long (I have a Dreamcast of unknown age which has a lot of trouble booting disks and an approximately nine-year-old XBox1 which is starting to have the same problems) but older cartridge-based consoles don't have this problem. Well looked after, can such machines last indefinitely?
I think the 128K, +2 and +3 are likely to run longer without problems since they don't have the complication of memory that expires with the slightest power supply problem. (For instance, out of a big box of Speccy stuff I was given, all the 128K models worked fine, but only a couple of the half a dozen of 48K models still worked, the broken ones all showing symptoms of bad lower RAM - well, except the one that lacked a ULA!)
Back to modern PC's: what's the oldest PC you have that's still (mostly) functional? 10 years is really old, 12~15 years is antique, and Speccies have that beat.
Perhaps it's a logical effect of the 'race to the bottom' in electronics land: products that fail too fast will make customers look elsewhere, products that are built to last would be more expensive than necessary. Market forces have put optimum somewhere around "the cheapest possible stuff that will only last until shiny new box is bought" (and very few people care what happens after that). In a way, we get what we want as consumers... ;-)
Well said!
I'd hazard a guess that many old IBM XTs that still exist will still work, they were built like tanks.
I have a Sun Ultra 5 from about 1999/2000 that's still chugging away just fine :-) (It's running as a general purpose server, provides storage for backups from my external webservers, provides the TNFS server for my network of Spectrums, and acts as the router for my IPv6 network onto the IPv6 internet). OK, so it's a former Unix workstation rather than a PC, but it has a lot in common with a PC of the era - PCI bus etc., it just has a 64 bit UltraSPARC IIi instead of an x86.
My current in-use laptop is 6.5 years old. It's been dropped many, many times and still works. (Indeed there's a dent in the case from the most recent drop, 3 foot onto a concrete floor, at R3PLAY no less...) But then again it's an Apple PowerBook, not a cheap PC clone.
By contrast my last PC clone lasted 6 years until it started developing problems (power supply; capacitors bulging). I replaced the power supply with a spare and it soldiered on for another few months before starting to expire for other reasons. At that point I decided it was best to upgrade (especially since it was a Pentium 4 space heater). Perhaps you have a very good point :-)