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McLaren Automotive

McLaren Automotive uses cutting edge technology to build some of the virtually powerful and beautiful sports cars on the planet. However, the decades-onetime McLaren F1 still holds a special place in the hearts of many machine buffs. Information technology's essentially a Formula Ane race machine that you can buy (if you lot're very rich). However, servicing this piece of work of automotive art requires technology that is anything just cut edge. In fact, your smartphone is considerably faster than the Compaq LTE 5280 laptop McLaren uses to interface with the F1.

The McLaren F1 was released in 1992 with a cost tag due north of $800,000. All that coin bought you the most powerful supercar in the world with 630 horsepower and a raft of sophisticated proprietary technologies. McLaren would eventually build 106 of these cars, 100 of which are still in existence today. Anyone who owns one of these vehicles is sure to want to accept proper care of information technology as the value has skyrocketed to more than than $10 million each.

Fifty-fifty with all the racing-grade cables, carbon cobweb chassis (a get-go when it was released), and custom BMW V12 engine, it was still designed in the early 90s. That means the car'due south brain is forever stuck in the by. When the time comes to have the McLaren F1 serviced, owners go straight to McLaren. You'd never let some random mechanic root around inside your $ten 1000000 supercar. In club to admission the diagnostic systems of the F1, McLaren needs to speak its ancient language with the aid of an equally ancient laptop, the aforementioned Compaq LTE 5280.

f1

The Compaq LTE line of laptops were introduced in 1989 and were some of the first computers that were truly portable. The 5280 came with an 11.iii-inch color LCD with a resolution of 800×600, and unheard of luxury in its mean solar day. Inside was a 120MHz Intel Pentium chip, 16MB of RAM, and a massive one.35GB hard drive. It was really meridian-of-the-line in its twenty-four hour period, much like the McLaren F1. The Compaq hasn't anile as well.

McLaren is stuck using these archaic laptops because they run a completely custom CA card that acts as an interface betwixt the machine and the laptop'due south DOS-based software. When one of its one-time Compaq laptops dies, McLaren has to find some other. You can pick up a Compaq LTE 5280 on eBay yourself for around $100. It's getting harder to find reliable hardware, every bit you might expect.

The automaker is working on a new interface for the F1 that will let the cars to speak to mod computers, only it's a complicated effort. Until that'southward done, McLaren volition need to keep its cluster of aboriginal laptops running to service one of the most valuable supercars on the planet.