I find it odd the author spends lots of time talking about vintage typewriters but then fails to consider vintage computers which can give some real life examples of computers that are still usable almost 50 years on from their original release. E.g. the Commodore 64, lots of working examples still around and now 42 years since first release.
Certainly a C64 is highly restrictive compared to a modern machine and were one to specifically build a computer to last 50 years it's not where you'd start but surely a machine that has actually lasted almost 50 years and remains usable has things to teach you about long lasting computer design.
In particular interesting to see how open source fits in. The modern C64 ecosystem has plenty of tools and utilities that do use open source software and hardware (e.g. the Kung Fu Flash cartridge: https://github.com/KimJorgensen/KungFuFlash) but plenty of the core software, that actually runs on the machine, is proprietary software the source is long gone for. It's still around because of archivists and pirates and can continue to be used because the original copyright holders don't care to enforce their copyrights. So is open source actually a core item as the author asserts or just a nice to have? Having the software be archived and easily available later was the key. Along with simplicity, you just run the monolithic binary, there's no dependencies and the software is sufficiently simple that hacking around with the raw binary is perfectly feasible.
Thinking about it the Apple II is a better example here, for one thing it's yet older (47 years). However I don't personally posses one nor have I ever used one so I concentrated on the C64.
The author talks about doing timeless activities well. You can still word process, do spreadsheets and program on an Apple II. Probably meets the author's 'sturdy and resilient' requirements as well as being a 'heavier and well-designed object'.
> So is open source actually a core item as the author asserts or just a nice to have?
I think there's a difference in terms here. Having a computer that lasts for 50 years doesn't necessarily mean that you want a computer that is forever unchanging, frozen in amber. You should be able to upgrade a long-term computer, if you want to (including the software); the point is just that you don't have to upgrade.
For the "frozen in amber" use case, sure, you could just pirate the proprietary stuff and hope to fly under the radar. But for the living use case, you need open source, even if that's based on some decompiled proprietary code.
The C64 ROM source code hasn't been lost (it's here: https://github.com/mist64/cbmsrc) but I would count it as "source available" because it's not freely licensed (I believe Cloanto owns the copyright to it).
I kind of feel like we’re rapidly approaching an end of history point on computing. The joke in the late 90s/early 00s was that your computer became obsolete on the way home from the store. My computing upgrade cycles have been getting longer and longer. Same with phones. I last upgraded my iPhone in 2022 not because I needed to (it was three years old), but because I wanted some of the newer features. What used to be a 2-year cycle like clockwork has stretched to 3 or 4 years. My laptop cycle has gone from 3 years to 5 years and that last only because the display stopped working (it’s now running headless in my music studio). The limiting factor has become less one of functionality and one of durability, and while there’s work to be done there, right now the economic factors don’t make sense. As revenue shifts to services from hardware though, I expect to see a greater emphasis on long-lasting computers until the expectation is that a computer, phone or tablet is expected to have a 10–15 year lifespan.
I have a 2014 macbook that I still use pretty regularly.
The only longevity issue is the battery, which is a limited lifetime part no matter what, and no support for the newest Xcode, which is unfortunate, but not a real limitation on what I use it for. It's something that I could probably work around by using opencore.
Its kind of crazy TBH. A 2004 macbook (powerbook?) would have been genuinely outdated in 2014, but in 2024, my 10 year old laptop is... fine?
Same thing with my phones. I went from an iphone 4, to a 5, to a 6 to an 11. And there I have stayed. There are a few features that would be nice to have, but not enough for me to fork over the cash. And my old one still does everything fine.
The real limitations are the incompatibilities with new APIs. I fixed up an old macbook air I found at a recycling center for a friend's kid (2011?) and getting it setup took some time since the imaged version of Safari incompatible with modern HTTPS. Once I cleared that hump, though, it was a great machine for youtube, browsing, etc...
> in 2024, my 10 year old laptop is... fine?
Except for the lack of security updates and it chokes when playing 1080p youtube videos and such.
Also, I doubt you've used any Apple Silicon systems. I had a MBP of similar vintage with a discreet GPU, with an upgraded SSD much faster than stock, and the M1 that replaced it was "holy shit" levels faster; now they're on the third gen with the fourth about to make it into portables and workstations.
Computers continue to work "forever" if you only use its own closed system, like writing Word documents on the harddrive. It's the complexity of the internet that makes hardware obsolete today. The internet consists of too many parts working together to make it profitable to focus on longevity and stability, the focus on the internet is instead flexibility and broad usage. And it's mostly the security standards that force us to buy new hardware in the end. From SSL to TLS, to TLS 1.2 & 1.3, almost all sites upgraded to the new standards and made old web browsers not work to browse the internet with anymore. And if the newest web browser your computer supports is one before 2014 (before TLS 1.2), your computer is dead, because it can't visit the internet. So it's mostly the software layer of the internet that makes us not get "forever computers", and therefore "we" software people maybe are the ones with the power to make a change here?
It's the misalignment of software developers' interests with those of end users that makes old systems unusable. Do we really need web pages that stream 4 video ads on loading and have another pop-up over top of the content the user requested asking us to subscribe? I miss the simplicity of the old days.
I'm using TLS 1.3 based sites with Dillo just fine.
I have several computers that are 40 years old. I think the reason the old 80s microcomputers last so long is they don't have any moving parts like disk drives that go bad (I've had really bad success with the external disk drives I've purchased). Unfortunately, I think the reason why computers and phones don't last a long time now is because the companies designing the phones, computers, and operating systems WANT them to quit working.
The reason computers slow down and stop working worth a damn has nothing to do with the hardware, it's the operating system's receiving "updates" that make them quit working. I have a TRS-80 Color Computer running the Microsoft BASIC "operating system" that Bill Gates wrote himself and it still works great 40 years later.
And then the big issue with phones are the batteries. The phone manufacturers know that the batteries go bad, so they glue them into the phones so you can't replace them. Obviously if you wanted the phones to last a long time, you'd make it to where you can put a new battery in the damn thing. They also know that the screens break, so they'd make those easy to replace yourself as well if they cared.
That is nice you can take phones to those little repair places and they seem to do a nice job replacing screens and batteries, but they could probably design a phone where you can do it yourself.
One of the issues with user replaceable batteries is waterproofing (IP rating).
My first smartphone was a Samsung Galaxy S1. It had an easilly swappable battery which was great because time between recharges was much shorter in those days so I had 2, one in the phone and one in the charger.
But once I got the phone wet just using it outside in the rain. After that it refused to charge for several days until it dried out.
More recently I've dropped my phone in water and it was perfecty fine with no drying time at all...
Sounds like a great and interesting engineering problem to work on.
The corporations still will not work on it though, for the exact reasons your parent commenter outlined.
I for one I am not convinced that we have to choose between swappable batteries and water-proof devices. I say we can have both -- but nobody in the business wants to figure it out, for obvious reasons.
We don't have to choose. Those phones exist, they just don't sell well. Here's one you've never heard of: https://www.samsung.com/uk/smartphones/others/galaxy-xcover7...
We have to choose between swappable batteries, waterproofness, and compactness. most people are more concerned with waterproofness and compactness, and are perfectly happy to have a phone where the battery is not field serviceable.
Resealable waterproof cases that don't require adhesives are less reliable and bulkier. Nobody really wants a waterproof phone, with a replaceable battery, that has an o-ring seal that can be defeated by a cat hair.
The phones do exist, but you have to go looking for them.
How about:
Waterproof phone* (excluding contacts for the battery and 3.5mm audio ports, which can be submerged without long term damage), and
Waterproofed battery* (safe to submerge, refuses to discharge unsafely).
I, personally, would also sacrifice compactness for robustness. I don't rock climb, but make a phone that can survive a tumble of multiple 10 meter drops and rolls and twists down a rock face. It must still be able to call EMS. That spec sounds bullet-proof enough to survive my relative's young kids worst antics.
I wouldn't mind a Galaxy Xcover at all by the way, but here's one more war the corporations push people away from these devices: lack of software updates.
:(
The corporate excuse before was “no one would buy a brick”, now the excuse is “no one would buy a non-waterproof phone”. We have the technology to make a user-replaceable phone with modern parts, just look at the Fairphone.
An excuse to link one of my favorite NASA/Honeywell slideshows:
https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
The long story short is that there are byzantine failure methods which prevent a 50 year computer. A sample:
- Capacitors can act as bullets
- Forced air cooling creating water
- The smaller the parts, the greater the chance they'll transmute to another part. Even, or especially in solid state parts.
- Digital isn't (i.e. 1 isn't really full voltage, and 0 isn't really no voltage).
- Thermal expansion matters, even for ICs on a board.
- Wire length, and the position of sensors on that wire, matters.
A 50 year computer would probably have to be one in which each part can and is replaced on a schedule. And the faster the computer is, the more often parts would need to be replaced. Additionally, if we want 100% uptime there would also have to be sufficient redundancies to ensure that the computer could continue operating during failures or replacements of components.
The 'survivor bunker' control computer that has maintenance every 5, even 10, years does have a different specification than one that must survive untouched, 'mothballed', for 50+ years and still work properly. In both cases I would prefer a standard modular interface, ideally a presently popular one like USB-A since I doubt it'll be a while before that's completely phased out. Even then it'll be someone's hobby project to have a not-quite off the shelf adapter.
The web sure is convenient, but for the actual work I do, I could in fact work on a 30 to 35 year old computer. I mostly code, and occasionally I process words or spread sheets. All things I could do on a DOS machine, or even something like an Apple //e. I'd certainly be fine on an Amiga. I'd be on cloud nine with a NeXTCube. I don't know that I'm willing to go older than early 80s, though. I need my computer to at least handle both uppercase and lowercase.
So arguably we've already built computers that last 40 years. Another decade doesn't seem crazy.
This is also why when we eventually do have a breakthrough in AI or quantum computing, it wont change anything. We'll just use AI to serve ads on Quantum Facebook, or something equally useless. So many web frameworks have come out in the past 10 years and more then ever websites are spammy, bloated, and less intuitive than they were 10 years ago.
I love wikipedia because it's more performant than facebook or youtube, it doesn't track me, it doesn't have anything moving or sliding around the page to increase "engagement" ,, it just gives me info without making me fight for it. I wish every website was wikipedia. I don't need react or angular, I don't 60fps buttons with smooth gradients. I just want my info
Yeah, it's mostly about "last 50 years doing what?".
Someone else mentioned the Voyager space probes. I think there are cars from the 70s and 80s with some embedded computers and some of these are still on the road too. The computer electronics can be made robust if desired. The hard part is if you mean "general purpose" and you want to include purposes of the future that we haven't explored yet.
I've recently powered up some "portable" Toshiba computers from around 1990. Aside from the CMOS clock batteries being dead and resetting to the wrong time, they booted DOS and I was able to use their existing programs to inspect the existing data files, delete things, and run a disc scrubbing utility. The vacuum fluorescent display worked like new, the hard drive still worked, etc.
These would still work for word processing etc. But with their RAM, storage, and IO limitations, they wouldn't work for modern use cases with modern sized media payloads.
I recall my 386-class machine that supported my computer science course work in university. It was able to barely decode a short 320x240 ~10 fps MPEG video demo from a research group. Its entire disk space was only about 80 MB, whereas today I may have bigger files than that on my phone.
You could build some kind of Computer of Theseus that has sensible buses and modular pieces to allow it to be expanded over time to support new use cases. I think they are called "mainframes". But, economics aren't going to make this cheap and competitive enough for consumer use cases.
This is what desktop PCs were for us in recent decades. It's not going to make it 50 years, but we got a lot of mileage out of the various buses and power connectors to allow incremental upgrades of parts. Eventually, you wipe the slate to get rid of some of the most legacy parts, buses, and form factors. Nobody's PC power supply from 1990 was going to support a modern GPU, not to mention the changing power needs of CPUs and mainboards.
I think we have reached a point in tech where there isn't a huge benefit about changing computer every 3 years like in the past.
You can have a computer with 10 years that can run modern OSs and software without being incompatible or too slow, a thing totally impossible 20 years ago.
If you do AI related developement or play videogames, you would require at least a new GPU, but outside that, I think the only couple things (pretty major IMO) making those computers less useful are more complex video formats not available to decode by hardware, and the vast amount of code some web apps use (try using YouTube or Twitter in an old laptop)
Security issues are the driver now. I had to shut down some machines at work last month because their CPUs have a microcode flaw that the vendor is not releasing a fix for.
That heavily depends on your usage. Most microcode security issues are local-only, so if your use case doesn't require the local execution of arbitrary executable code, all you lost is one extra security layer, which would become relevant only if other security layers (the ones which prevent arbitrary local code execution in the first place) fail.
Haven't we basically already built them? They're just slow and not supported by software vendors so nobody wants to use them. Other than replacing capacitors and realtime clock batteries on every 20 years or so, dusting and replacing fans when bearings go bad (assuming it's not a passively-cooled design), most computers should basically last beyond a human lifetime (I've read that those less than ~20nm will go bad over time as traces lose atoms and eventually fail, but older processes should be fine).
> older processes should be fine
Except for metal whiskering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
However the older solders have a much higher percentage of lead in their composition which makes whiskering less likely. I have two Zenith Z-120s made in about 1980 and thus coming up on 50 years old which don’t have any issues.
I know of a running TRS80 and a BBC Model-B, but the retro-heads who own them jst pwer them up now and then, not in constant use so as not to heat-stress them. TBH they smell a bit. My theory is the transformer windings are on the way out.
Wire-wrap avoids that altogether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap
> Haven't we basically already built them?
Yes, we have. I have a few computers that old or older, and they run just fine. Every so often a dried-up capacitor has to be replaced, but that's about it.
Hard drives will probably go bad before capacitors, most of the time.
One of them is in interstellar space
Not just interstellar space. Everything in space needs to be radiation hardened, thus equal to a 50 year old computer.
They do use laptops, but not for much longer than a year. The basics must endure longer.
Are you talking about C64?
Desktop PC hardware is sufficiently modular and easy to upgrade. It would be nice if upgrades were add-on rather than throwing away the replaced module(s) but HW changes so fast it's almost never worth it. Software could be improved to make things longer lasting such as make clean install trivial with good separation of user vs system data. I recently added an SSD and made my old HDD the G: drive but the new instance of Windows on the SSD did not consider the new SSD userid with the same name as the old HDD userid to be the same user and so accessing the old files became a file sharing nightmare. Also the old HDD drive started taking forever for reboot file system checks and I had to just disconnect it. So now I am wading through all my old backups trying to figure out what is what.
i like to think about thought experiments like this: what if electronics/large consumer goods were all bar-coded and, when they are disposed of, scanned in, and the original manufacturer is charged some fee for the recycling/disposal of them. Make "repairing with minimal waste" the recurring revenue that product companies shoot for, rather than the new new thing.
Whether it happens in tens, hundreds, thousands, or more years, every physical product has a finite lifespan.
So it might be simpler to charge a fee when a product is initially manufactured that is based on the current cost of disposing that product. Perhaps this could even replace things like consumer sales tax or VAT.
That would incentivize manufacturers to create products with minimal disposal costs, and it would incentivize consumers to hang on to products longer or buy used.
Canada charges a recycling fee when you purchase electronics. The claim is that it covers all costs of recycling at an audited/approved recycler.
When you are done with your electronics you can drop them off at any recycling center to be disposed.
It varies by province, but the cost is actually pretty minimal. I think the most expensive fee in my province is a large display at $7. The recycling fee for a laptop is less than a dollar.
It doesn't incentivize less consumption when you are paying the tax up front, but it does incentivize making sure that the electronics actually make it to the correct waste stream instead of the landfill.
We've had this in France for a bit more than 10 years: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Éco-participation
It's a fixed fee based on the category of the device though, so not really an incentive for companies to change their ways, other than moving the entire business line from making iPhones to light bulbs.
I guess the point of charging the company at the time of disposal would be that they'd be earning interest on that money in the meantime. So they'd be incented to make it last longer.
It wouldn't work for several reasons though, not least because the company could cease to exist before the product failed.
And it'd also open up a whole new exciting Futures market!
Recycling, as is, means reducing something to its component materials. We need to incentivize manufacturers such that it means reducing something to its component parts. Testable parts, with standard interfaces.
Perhaps we should have that bar code link to a prepaid account which handles shipping it back to the manufacturer. Things will be more repairable if making the most of a broken one was the manufacturer's problem.
Most modern MOS circuits are no longer designed to last 50 years, unlike most integrated circuits and discrete semiconductor devices of 50 years ago. There is no chance for any up-to-date CPU or memory module to work for 50 years.
Nevertheless, it is quite easy to be able to use a modern computer for 50 years, if you just get 10 computers that do not contain components that age even when they are not used, e.g. batteries or electrolytic capacitors, and you use one computer until it breaks, keeping the others in storage until you must replace the current work computer.
Such a set of modern computers would be faster, cheaper and smaller than a single computer in the style of PDP-11 or VAX, made by using low-density components that can work for 50 years.
A good laptop will last for 5-10 years, about as long a car, I guess. 20 year laptops (Thinkpads mostly) are still around.
If average laptop lifetime is about 5 years (for all reasons), then about 0.1% will make it to 50 years and remain operational.
The average car on the road is 12 years old in the us. I suspect average laptop is around 4.
Modern notebooks don't last. You drop it 3-4 times and the hinges are busted.
I don’t agree. There were old tanks, sure, but regular laptops were plastic and flimsy. Even PowerBooks would slightly flex when handled by the edges.
Apple led the way with the unibody aluminum case and now even midrange laptops are pretty sturdy.
Mildly tech-savvy people make weird choices. Pointing at thicker laptops and calling it outdated and unattractive, for example.
Modern cars don't last. You crash them three or four times and the wheels fall off.
Only for consumer-grade stuff, which is basically disposable garbage that's obsolete the day you purchase it, which is about what you get for $350 at Walmart. For any actually decent laptop designed for enterprises/businesses, this is not true, they still have steel hinge pins and plastic-over-metal hinge bodies. Doesn't really matter if you buy Dell, Lenovo, Apple, business-quality laptops don't have these issues, but they do start at around $1000/unit.
The problem with any discussion around electronics longevity is that it's a bimodal market. You have the stuff that generates the bulk of revenue, which is generally meant to be purchased as a "fleet" by businesses or MSPs, and you have the stuff that generates the bulk of the actual devices, but at most lower BOM cost (meaning lower quality) which is targeted at "consumers". Anybody who is even a little bit technical has already noticed this simply due to the difference in experience between the laptop they're issued at work vs what they may have once had at home, and likely has opted to bite the bullet and pay for quality.
Once you are on the higher end of the bimodal distribution, longevity is a significantly different challenge. I have an X230 laptop I bought new in 2012 that is still in use weekly and functions completely fine. My much newer M3 Macbook Pro is significantly more powerful, but is completely unnecessary for what that laptop is for. That's 12 years of usage without any sign of slowing down, and since that X230 is my car laptop I use in my race car for tuning and data monitoring, I can guarantee it's had a lot worse than "3-4 drops" over the last 12 years, including surviving a crash in my old race car.
Laptops and also smartphones dont last in my experience.. Too much miniaturisation imo. I dont buy them 2nd hand, I only buy new ones as they only have a limited life. Desktops on the other hand, will last forever, I buy those 2nd hand and they are so cheap but they function perfectly.. Also if something does break they are modular and its trivial to replace the broken part.
It greatly depends on the laptop, even within the same manufacturer. I have lots of old Apple gear that still works but is just too old to get security updates:
- 2012 13" MBP, works great with an SSD upgrade, and the hinge is still solid, which was not the case with my 2009 15" MBP where the screen literally ripped off.
- 2013 15" retina MBP. Great laptop, still plenty fast to use today, but runs a little hot and the battery life was never amazing.
- 2015 12" retina Macbook. Survived two glasses of water spilled on it, but the speakers and bluetooth died. It was miserably slow to use anyway.
My daily driver is now a 15" M3 Macbook, which has been amazing in nearly every way. Only minor complaints is that the ram maxes out at 24GB and I wish I had 1 more USB port on the other side.
> Lots of writers keep using [typewriters], they became trendy in the 2010s and, to escape surveillance, some secret services started to use them back. It’s a very niche but existing market.
At first blush, this sentiment appears to also be true of old computers. There is growing "trendy" interest in them, and they're otherwise still fit for purpose for some tasks, like gaming, writing, driving long-unsupported hardware or software. The community around it has been rather industrious in servicing old machines, particularly Macs.
But they cannot satisfy all the requirements we have of a modern computer, and neither can a typewriter. However, the length of time a computer has before being truly obsolete seems much longer now than it used to be. You could easily get a decade or more if you can control the itch for new and shiny and have modest performance needs.
Might need to replace the battery, if the device has one. There's some luck involved with getting the longest support window possible from MS or Apple. Google and co are famously a lot worse on this front, if we're talking phones.
I’m going on 7 years with my iMac Pro now and it’s still more than enough for my uses. (Audio recording/production) I am hoping to get 3 more years out of it if possible. We’ll see if Apple lets that happen.
If you do that work professionally, optimizing solely for capex while ignoring opex and the cost of business interruption, is not sound.
MOCAS is still going from 1958... Hardware has been updated a few times and it currently runs on a IBM 2098 model E-10 mainframe (2008?)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/06/166822/what-is-t...
I have a Tandy trs-80 model 100 which is at least 40 years old. Not so far from the 50 year mark.
The voyager spacecrafts are almost fifty years old.
I couldn't help thinking of the AlphaSmart[0] while reading this. The writer's primary need seems to be an offline, lasts-forever writing device, so no version of the AlphaSmart meets all the criteria. But it is (or was) an offline-only device that was limited to writing and a few educational applications. The keyboard was excellent, text could be transferred between device and computer via cable, and the AA-batteries would last for literally hundreds of hours.
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/06/visiting-the-facom-128b-1958...
I was quite impressed to learn about the 66 year-old computer that is still in use with the Japanese transit system.
The Apple IIGs exists. I have one. I think it's going to make it to 50 no problem.
I really vibe with the author’s vision: an offline-first computer, made to last.
Voyager is still going, qndand has a computer by very early definition.
>But this permanent connectivity is a choice. We can design a computer to be offline first. Once connected, it will synchronise everything that needs to be: mails will be sent and received, news and podcasts will be downloaded from your favourite websites and RSS, files will be backuped, some websites or gemini pods could even be downloaded until a given depth. This would be something conscious. The state of your sync will be displayed full screen. By default, you would not be allowed to use the computer while it is online. You would verify that all the sync is finished then take the computer back offline. Of course, the full screen could be bypassed but you would need to consciously do it. Being online would not be the mindless default.
Offpunk. Slrn with slrnpull and mutt +mbsync/msmtp. Heaven.
Offpunk:
E-ink maybe isn't it, anyway. A few years ago I built an e-ink clock/gimmick that refreshed every few seconds with some different text on a given part of the screen, and within 1.5 years the sides unto about 2cm in - but not the parts being constantly refreshed! - had more stuck/weak pixels than not. A halo of rot. 50 years is a long time, much longer than 1.5.
(2021)
Naval ships are loaded with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_gun_fire-control_system...
Voyager 1 and 2 are still functioning. And they were built on the cheap.. They certainly weren't supposed to last 47 years but they did.