On a related note, I bought a Carver stereo in the early 80's (M-200t amp and C-1 preamp). I run it every day all day. That's 30 years of daily use. And yet it still works like a champ (I replaced the on-off switch as it wore out). I guess they didn't use cheap caps in it!
Walter Bright! I remember Zortech C, and some micro cross compilers. Thanks.
As an interesting note, I cracked open /A/D/S car amps and related gear from 1980's. Crazy engineering... No tantalum or electrolytics anywhere in sight. Props to whomever worked on that.
I was going to see what I had on that old AT hard disk.
I had a 486 that hasn't seen power since 1993. I tried powering that up, but the POST beeps suggested the keyboard controller had failed. Oh well. So I pulled out the drives, and my external IDE controller wouldn't recognize them. But my old Windows XP box's controller did, and I was able to read the old drives (200Mb and 500Mb respectively). It was kinda fun to see what detritus I'd left on them, but sadly no gold bullion.
That 486 was the last machine I had that would boot OS/2. Oh well! To the dustbin of history.