They were used by the Quake-Catcher Network project from Stanford. Although from the OS.
...seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers.
Edit: Yes, I meant ms⁻² not g. Been a while since I've done any physics. 9.8g is probably more like what it would sense when hitting the floor, which is a bit too late to do anything useful. At least I didn't claim it to be 6.54×10⁻¹⁰ Nm²kg⁻² (bonus points if you get this).
9.8g? Is your office inside a centrifuge? :-P
g already means "9.8 m/s²"
Thus, normal gravity is 1g and free fall is 0g. 9.8g would mean 9.8 times the gravity at Earth surface, that is "96 m/s²". You would feel almost ten times as heavy. For reference:
Jupiter "surface" gravity is 25.9 m/s²
Sun "surface" gravity is 274 m/s²
Lesson: Don't try to take it standing up.
Which is obviously wrong if you think of it as measuring the acceleration of the laptop. The physical acceleration of the laptop is obviously zero when it is at rest on a table. (Acceleration is the change in speed, and the laptop has zero change in speed.)
If you think about the accelerometer as a little micromechanical arm which is being deflected relative to the laptop by the force of gravity, it makes a lot more sense. When they're falling together the deflection is 0.
I gave it some thought, and no, I don't think you can build a self-contained one. But if you allow external communications it becomes very doable (see: GPS system). Also, if you allow another input that tells the device it's orientation wrt. the gravitational field, say a magnetic field sensor, it becomes easy.
ps: #ibmthinkpad refreshed my memory.
> old thinkpads (<= T60/61 or something): hdaps.ko from the kernel
> newer thinkpads (up to X201/T400/T410?) hdaps.ko from tp-smapi
> new thinkpads: no wai (simply because no linux driver as of now, nobody reversed the windows driver yet)
The system board has an accelerometer, which can be broken when
several thousands of G-forces are applied.
Note: Dropping a system board from a height of as little as 6 inches
so that it falls flat onto a hard bench can subject the accelerometer
to as much as 6000 G's of shock.