There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this:
In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265:
"This computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed."
That's absolutely brilliant. If you're going to steal overpriced laptops from the government, do it with style...
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...They use relatively off-the-shelf laptop PCs on the space station? This strains my sense of credibility.
Actually, they do use off the shelf laptops for more personal and less mission critical stuff (email, etc.). If I remember correctly, they used to have a whole bunch of IBM Thinkpads that you could see in pictures from the ISS. Of course to actually control the space station, they use radiation hardened CPUs which are probably of a 1980s vintage (286-486s, Motorola 68000s, and early IBM Power chips). I think the larger and more separated features of these older chips help protect them from the effects of radiation in addition to some additional shielding.
Wow.
The NASA people I've worked with (admittedly a cross section so minuscule as to be anecdotal) would have had a cow about making them all ruggedized and space hard, no matter what they were used for.
Those guys were great at being obstructionists.
Some astronauts used Grid Systems Compass PCs onboard the Space Shuttle, sometimes running software written in my Software Engineering Department at Rockwell Space Transportation Systems Division, Downey, California.
That division is now part of Boeing. That facility is now a film studio. I expect another space shuttle mission to end with fatalities. But not because of the PCs.