Some electronics gear is built for the roughest conditions. With rugged steel cases, weatherproof gaskets, and cables passing through sealed glands, these machines are built to take the worst that Mother Nature can throw at them, shrugging off dust, mud, rain, and ice. Consumer-grade computers from the start of the home PC era, however, are decidedly not such machines.
Built to a price point and liable to succumb to a spilled Mountain Dew, few machines from that era that received any kind of abuse lived to tell the tale. Not so this plucky Commodore 64C, which survived decades exposed to the elements. As [Adrian Black] relates in the video below, this machine was on a scrap heap in an Oregon field, piled there along with other goodies by one of those “pickers” that reality TV loves so much. The machine was a disaster. It hadn’t been soaked in oil, but it was loaded with pine needles and an ant colony. The worst part, though, was the rust. The RF shielding had corroded into powder in some places, leaving reddish rust stains all over the place. Undeterred, [Adrian] gave the machine a good bath, first in water, then in isopropanol. Liberal applications of Deoxit helped with header connections, enough to see that the machine miraculously booted. It took some finagling, especially with the 6526 I/O controller, but [Adrian] was eventually able to get everything on the motherboard working, even the sound chip.
Whether this machine survived due to good engineering or good luck is debatable, but it’s a treat to see it come back to life. We hope a full restoration is in the works, not least as a way to make up for the decades of neglect.
Thanks for the tip, [Katie].
You could easily nickel plate those ICs again.
If only Commodore Corporation had been as robust as this 64 we’d still be using Commodore computers today.
Good point. Sadly, Jack Tramiel took some bad decisions on how to manage his star product and the same for the new developments. In any case, it seems that these machines will be with us for a long time.
Tramiel left Commodore ten years before it collapsed, to start Atari Corporation. What bad decisions are you referring to?
He didn’t leave to start Atari. Atari was already there. He was selling his MOS 6502 CPUs to Atari as well as Apple and others from years back then. Here is a shot list of events.
Jack Tramiel creates Commodore, a type write company. Later he makes calculators. Later he buys MOS chip company and KIM-1 is a precursor computer to all preceding 8-bit line of Commodore computers. Commodore becomes personel computer industry leader. Commodore goes into financial problems. Irving Gould buys and saves Commodore and Jack Tramiel runs it but Irving Gould is his boss and owner of Commodore. Irving Gould uses company money and resources for non Commodore things. Jack Tramiel is not happy with this. Jack Tramiel goes into a fight and Jack Tramiel parts his way from Irving Gould and as a consequence leaves all things Commodore. He buys Atari probably in hopes of destroying Irving Gould (and indirectly Commodore) and probably also for becoming industry leader in personal computing. IBM and clones rules the industry. All companies before IBM pc era gets destroyed except only for Apple.
I forgot to mention, the only reason Apple stil exists is because Bill Gates saves Apple since Microsoft was facing legal issues due to becoming a pc industry monopoly back then so he had to keep some opponent existing, so he saves Apple but he purposely does not buy it technically. even though theoretically he could have easily bought it, he prefers to keep it as a separate entity without any legal ties to Microsoft. Then, Steve Jobs allows microsoft Internet Explorer to be the default browser in his back then version of mac os as part of this deal.
So basically one can consider that actually all computer companies from pre IBM pc era couldn’t exist and Apple only still exists due to a technicality.
So, this maybe could have been Commodore instead of Apple if Irving Gould wasn’t such an asshole.
Need to up your game to Deoxit D100 with THIS level of angry pixie pollution! :D
Is that, like, 95 better than D5?
can a person be that bored in life?
Like there were not enough TV shows to follow.
Learning something beats a hell of a lot of those shows.
Not sure if trolling or on the wrong website.
Possibly both.
Still got my Commodore 64 – my college workhorse. What a robust and fun product that was.
Favorite app? made my own speech synthesizer and plugged it into an i/o card. Buzz, grbble, plop. Worked great.
Ah, so it speaks Droidspeak
Also the language of Binary Load Lifters. -very similar in most respects.
B^)
Binary Load Lifters are… problematic droids. They can only do two states with their loads. Up or Down. So if you need a load lifted 2 meters, you call for a 2 meter BLL.
But you have to make sure the pallet is in good condition and the load on it is securely packed and strapped down to the pallet. It must also be robust enough to withstand very high G forces.
The BLL will roll over, insert its forks into the pallet then lift the load to its 2 meter height in 0.001 second.
Getting the pallet set down onto the cargo deck of your spacecraft can be… problematic with a Binary Load Lifter. It works best if the BLL carrying its load can roll onto the ship’s deck.
Analog Load Lifters tend to be more practical.
Absolutely amazing though in a dump, conditions could have been much worse. Great effort tbough
Decades ago I found an old tube radio in a dump, I cleaned out the detritus, super-glued the cracked Bakelite case, replaced the line cord, one tube, and gave the case a coat of shoe polish. It worked fine for years. Last month I replaced a failed 12SK7 in it.
That’s great. We had a tradition of rescuing things from the dump when I was a kid. We had a guy lived down the road who would repair TV, radio, stereos, washing machines eyc
“Built to a price point and liable to succumb to a spilled Mountain Dew, few machines from that era that received any kind of abuse lived to tell the tale.”
We build closer to the engineering and manufacturing edge these days. Works, but less forgiving.
+100
It’s a miracle that some of these cheap laptops being cranked out work at all, or even stay constructed. Smartphones are black magic all together. We are creeping closer to the boundary of material failure on plastic latches/hinges that hold electronics together. I just wish we could get some more screws.
Glue should be verboten when it comes to assembly.
Screws and gaskets please.
It’s not even the “cheap” or “low-end” hardware that’s at failure’s edge: flash memory, high speed gigabit transmission, wireless transmission, etc. All of those have an *incredibly* high intrinsic failure rate – they’re just compensated for with error correction and software. Hence the reason why pretty much nothing fails gracefully anymore: they seem to work fine up until the point where the error correction stops being able to handle it, and then “poof”, everything goes boom.
” I just wish we could get some more screws.”
I had an unwritten rule of thumb when I worked on TV’s, “The more screws you need to remove to access it, the cheaper it was built.”
You say that, but my £5 Logitech keyboard is basically dishwasher-safe.
My cordless Logitech keyboard has the same battery after 7 years and two towers.
Scared to screw with it..
You people have no joy in your lives anymore…
They were talking about THIS https://youtu.be/4GCrAKpvvuU?t=82
Challenge accepted..
https://youtu.be/R-fqv2gfXb8
It may work today but I can’t believe it is long for this world. I bet that rust will spread right through a trace somewhere before long even if it is stored in ideal conditions now.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a new PCB. Most of the chips do appear to be socketed.
I’ve seen worse. Just hose it off, run it through the dishwasher, then dry it in the oven on low heat while the wife is out of the house.
Surely that would be the wifes job?
(ducks, and runs away quickly … )
A food dehydrator works very well for drying washed circuit boards. My Xbox 360 was given to me after its owner’s cigarette smoke killed the DVD laser. It got a thorough bath of everything except the hard drive, a new DVD sled off eBay, and I boiled the disc drive tray belt for a minute.
very interesting blog post I love my C64 its a great machine