need help with an old ST-251 MFM drive...

I'm with Joe on this one. I can go out any day of the week and buy I/O boards for $2/dozen, or, certainly, for <$2 and the 8250/16C450/16C550 always costs more than that. These typically have TWO 8250's or whichever equvalent is used on them. The risk of damage to these extremely low-quality boards, since they got to be so cheap by cutting the quality, when unsoldering parts is pretty great, and, if I were going to do that, I'd probably use a torch, which would ruin the board anyway, expose me to toxic fumes, etc. It seems pretty silly to me to spend time and resources fixing a <$1 board when replacing the IC borders on 10x the cost and inconvenience. It's not a scarce board like one from an old PDP-5. These things were turned out at rates on the order 5K per hour, from dozens of vendors and there are still millions of them lying about in junk boxes everywhere. If you really like desoldering parts, then your time is better spent salvaging parts that can be reused rather than desoldering known bad parts. Leave the bad parts in the board and desolder the good ones. It will be another decade before PC I/O boards are scarce, so I'm only saving a few. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "joe" &lt;rigdonj(a)intellistar.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 10:31 AM Subject: Re: need help with an old ST-251 MFM drive...