Humphrey Bogart and some of those guys from Hollywood's good old days may have had rugged good looks, but other than that, not much was rugged back then. Cars certainly weren't, and a couple decades later, computers definitely weren't. In the early days of Pen Computing Magazine, which we launched in 1993, we often saw "rugged" machines that looked tough but were little more than science projects inside. Maybe the manufacturers thought we wouldn't take them apart. We did. And what we saw often wasn't pretty.

Even today it's not always clear what "rugged" means. Or "semi-rugged" or "durable." A few years ago word reached us that a manufacturer was all bent out of shape because we had listed one of their products as "semi-rugged" and their competitor's as "rugged." Well, they had it as "semi-rugged" on their own website. Oh well. Point is, it's really not easy to figure out what is rugged, or how rugged.

One thing that gets me is how much "rugged" stuff these days is shiny and gleaming. To my way of thinking, shiny and gleaming surfaces get scratched, and very easily at that. They sure look good, but personally I wouldn't mind some good old-fashioned real protection, like rubber or plastics -- stuff that is really scratch-proof. And what's with those eensy-teensy little Phillips screws use in so many "rugged" products? Here's Blickenstorfer's law: all Phillips screws must be hard enough not to get stripped by a screw driver. They must be large enough so a regular screw driver can handle them. And they should all be the same size.

Anyway. What's really fun is that we're seeing a lot more "rugged" stuff. At RuggedPCReview.com's sister sites (scubadiverinfo.com and digitalcameraroundup.com) we test cameras. And some of them are now rugged and water-proof. Olympus makes one that you can drop from four feet and also take down to a depth of 33 feet. Which of course meant I took it to 66 just to see if it'd flood. It didn't. But it had gleamy, shiny surfaces and so it got scratched. Last weekend I was diving Lake Tahoe and took a rugged SeaLIfe ECOshot camera with me. That one you can take down to 75 feet (so I took it to 110), and it's so rugged you can run a car over it. Which we did. Yup. It still works.

Now I see that the new Nomad has an IP 67 rating. Which means it can be immersed in water. Hmmm.... I wonder if Rob Nickel would freak if I suggested we take one for a bit of underwater computing. Not deep, just, say, seven feet or so. Now that'd be cool.