4 Jul
2025
4 Jul
'25
2:34 a.m.
Early Honeywell boards were wire-wrap so they could easily be updated in
the field. The board tester we had read test vectors from punched cards and
stopped reading cards when it found a fault. The tester had a display for
the card number. The FE looked up the test and card number and the chart
said which chip had failed. It was not good at finding intermittent faults.
On Fri, Jul 4, 2025, 2:29 AM David Wade via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 03/07/2025 19:00, cz via cctalk wrote:
Well the Honeywell 6000 & Level 66 series machines
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Honeywell_6000_series
came with a board tester which was supposed to identify a faulty IC but
I can't remember how successful it was. I seem to remember L66 boards
were about 12"/30cms square and mostly TTL or MOS Memory.
the CE dropped the board into the tester which told him which chip to
change..
I think the most changed chips were RAM.
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
Dave