[HN Gopher] A brief history of hardware epidemics
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A brief history of hardware epidemics
Author : ingve
Score : 43 points
Date : 2025-06-21 08:18 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| TZubiri wrote:
| Interesting, I love the field of infectious disease and of course
| software, so the intersection is always fascinating.
|
| A related failure mode (which is closer to organ transplants I
| guess), is that when replacing a part with a faulty one, a defect
| in the new part can cause the other parts to bear more load. When
| a part fails abruptly you have a halted system and a lot of
| healthy parts, but when a part fails gradually, the whole system
| starts to degrade with it by sympathy.
|
| And of course electrical networks are a classical example of
| faults expanding, there may be security devices to limit the
| failure to the device or even the local electrical network, but
| sometimes those failsafes fail, and that's what causes wide
| blackouts like the one in Spain recently.
| HPsquared wrote:
| This is called "cascading failure".
| jcalx wrote:
| From the title I was expecting some hardware faults that were
| transmissible (as opposed to merely widespread), like the classic
| "hardware virus" story from The Daily WTF:
| https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-hardware-virus
| vikingerik wrote:
| Yeah, the headline is using "epidemic" clickbaitly just to mean
| widespread, not transmissible.
|
| The classic real example of actual transmissibility was the Zip
| drive click of death. A bad drive would damage disks, which
| would in turn damage another drive they were put in. The case
| was rarer than people thought but did happen.
| https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm
| willyt wrote:
| I got an electric shock plugging in a zip drive once. They
| used to arc when you plugged the mains cord into the back of
| the drive or the power brick, I forget which.
| irishsultan wrote:
| The word epidemic does not imply contagiousness, not in the
| medical context and therefore definitely not outside of it.
| kibwen wrote:
| Yes, the definition of "epidemic" literally refers to
| something being widespread (etymology derived from "upon
| the people"). It's not wrong to refer to e.g. an obesity
| epidemic despite obesity not being contagious.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Or "Coding machines"
| https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I remember leadfree solder. I ordered an Nvidia 8800GT at that
| time and it was significantly delayed because of failures.
|
| The fix back then was to bake your GPU in the oven for a while,
| essentially reflowing some of the cracked solder.
|
| And I know of countless BMW M3s and M5s dying too soon because of
| early iterations of lead-free bearings.
|
| I understand the toxicity of lead, but I wonder if the hand
| could've been more targeted. Does lead in bearings really show up
| in the environment?
|
| The origin of the capacitor plague is so interesting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
|
| > A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the
| faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a
| scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a
| mis-copied formula for capacitors' electrolytes. He then took the
| faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China,
| where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the
| scientist's staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied
| formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own
| company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this
| faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes.
|
| Stolen and stolen again.
| cnasc wrote:
| > I understand the toxicity of lead, but I wonder if the hand
| could've been more targeted. Does lead in bearings really show
| up in the environment?
|
| Part of the issue is in manufacturing. It might be hard to
| prevent exposure of employees to lead dust if they're machining
| parts containing lead even if the final product isn't too
| risky.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| How relevant is this to solder? Typically soldering is done
| after machining, so machining dust should be a non issue.
|
| As far as I am aware, the act of soldering does not produce
| any sort of lead vapor or particulate either.
| bluGill wrote:
| How does the solder get manufactured? Don't forget to
| account for the rest of the supply chain - the mines for
| example
| Animats wrote:
| > As far as I am aware, the act of soldering does not
| produce any sort of lead vapor or particulate either.
|
| Er, no. Look up hazards of soldering fumes.
| nexttk wrote:
| It's the flux / resin also found in the solder that
| causes that. At the typical soldering temperature of 400
| degC, lead evaporates 10 million times slower than ice at
| -40 degC.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose the lead from bearings ends up in used engine oil.
| That's normally recycled afterwards though.
| abanana wrote:
| _> The fix back then was to bake your GPU in the oven for a
| while_
|
| Oh that brings back bad memories! We were running a LAN centre,
| and our 7900GT graphics cards were failing left and right. We
| bought 23 8800GTS cards to replace/upgrade the lot. After a
| year or so they all started failing too. Reflowing, i.e. baking
| in a cheap little electric oven in the staff room, would give
| them an extra 6 months or so of life. After each subsequent
| baking, it would last less time than the previous. Having to
| replace so many graphics cards, after a much shorter that
| expected lifespan, was a lot of money for a tiny business.
| (Having said that, looking at how much it would cost now, I
| shouldn't complain.)
|
| I read at the time that it was because of microscopic cracks in
| the solder, but hadn't realised before now that it was due to
| the removal of lead. We had no further problems after switching
| to AMD, but I never knew whether it was really an NVidia
| problem, or just those models, etc.
|
| The GeForce FX 5900XTs, from the 2004 PCs (before the article's
| 2006 date of the start of the problem), were still working fine
| 10 years later, albeit in old PCs used for just web access and
| the occasional game of Bejeweled.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Lead-free solder was such a big deal when it first came out, have
| things improved significantly like the author mentions in
| passing? Similar arguments were made about leaded gasoline when
| it was banned and tech caught up and made it not needed.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Missing: those switches on newer Logitech mice that fail with
| intermittent no-click/double-clicking on single click after about
| 8 months.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Apple replaced my 2015 MBP battery and my 2017 MBP butterfly
| keyboard for free, even though both machines were more than 5
| years old. Impressive I think.
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