We have a plant that was / is running a sparc 20 that is now 12+ years old. the hard drive died last week.
They brought in all the parts..
Sparc 20, w/1.0 gb hard drive internal, and a 2.0 gb scsi external, plus a 1/4" 250 MB tape drive.
I replaced the 2 drives with (2) 9gb hard drives
The tapes were dated 6/15/1996. The 1/4" drive was toast, but in a box in the back of the office was a brand new 1/4" drive. (box had a date on it of Jan/98) Used it to read the tapes and restore the system back from the dead. Then we were able to pull some backups off some 3 1/2" External Articon floppy drive for the source codes for their controllers.
I was AMAZED that all this crap worked. 12+ years and the tapes worked, and the floppys worked too. Just amazing.
We still have some 8" floppys in the store room, along with some nice little 10MB (yes that MB) drives that used to run entire plants.
Oh yeah.. forgot to mention that we looked thru the logs to see when the last time this machine was shut down, it was 2005. And before that was 2003. Now you talk about a workhorse.
