3 Jul
2025
3 Jul
'25
2:26 p.m.
That’s a good business practice anyway. You want your high price system up and running as
fast as possible, so not having to do more than cursory diagnostics is a good thing I
think deck realize that with the VAX and it’s remote the diagnostic capability as for the
board breaks, IBM used to do that for all the boards they replaced. They even had a
special board breaking tool.
My CE from IBM said that it costs IBM more to diagnose a faulty board than it does to make
a new one so that’s why they do it. Breaking the board also ensures that the engineers
won’t get caught up in a side project trying to figure out what went wrong.
Sent from my iPhone
On Jul 3, 2025, at 11:10, cz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Same here. The FE came prepared with a replacement board. Never repaired the board.
In and out!
Which makes sense. My guess is in the 80's 90's they would send the board back to
a rework facility and repair it there. BGA/PGA is not too difficult to do if you have a
good rework station, and the rest of the chips on the board were probably worth enough to
make the rework totally feasable.
By the mid 2000's, yeah they probably would just trash the board.
C