[Robotgroup] collectors hardware

[Sam O'nella]

We had a thread similar to this on the vintage
computer forums regarding frequency of powering on
your old systems.  Yeah they last a lot longer if you
give them power once a month (meaning my collection is
in trouble since it's pick and choose what I play with
at non-monthly intervals unless I get a new toy to
play with on them).

Most of it is the capacitors drying due to old age. 
As one person put he had the "the capacitor convert to
smoke".  Fortunately it's usually in the power supply
though and they're easy to replace if you do see one. 
Other than that most of the systems I have hold up
better than anything else that's come out in the last
10 years.

One of these days when I have a little more walking
room in the garage I'll let people see the collection
or drag some pictures in.

- John

--- Andre Lamothe <ceo at nurve.net> wrote:

> I have eeproms 25-30 years old still intact, bottom
> line is if you keep them 
> in good humidity, use them once in a while, they
> seem to survive quite long. 
> That said, my friend sellam ismail with the worlds
> largest private 
> collection is for the 1st time in history seeing
> that things are starting to 
> fail. For example, the IBM pc original from 1981 or
> so, they are now 
> starting to fail all over the place. Usually, he
> could just go grab one from 
> dozens he has to get working, now, he has to go thru
> 10+ to get a good 
> machine. So looks like 30 years is the realistic
> limit where we are going to 
> start seeing all this technology stop working that
> has any kind of volatile 
> memory systems other than real ROM, PROMS. Any kind
> of eeprom, earrom, etc. 
> are going to go bye bye.
> 
> Andre'

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