Sure. Tell the customer he/she will be down an extra
hour while
you extend the board to find the fault, desolder the chip
and replace the 10 cent bus driver. Nope. Swapping was reality in the field
when I was there.
I must agree here. Doing component level debugging just makes no sense in
the field.
Board level (early 80's DEC) was (unfortunately)
replaced with shotgunning and option swap out by many in the late 80's.
Did the boards not go back to DEC for rework?
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net