DEC troubleshooting

< Yes, they did, with red tags on them supposedly describing the fault < to help someone diagnose and fix the boards. But many of them simply < ended up in salvage, which many of us used to visit each week to < find stuff for our home systems. At that time (more than a decade salvage was for "excess" and junked. Boards there were either plentiful and therefor costly to store the excess or they were out of rev. Also boards or FRUs that were not in reve and not upgradeable were salvaged. Sometimes there were boards that went through the depot repair cycle twice and were considered unreliable. < I miss salvage... As the cost of materials and the economics of depot repair became attractive so there was less and less material going to salvage. Also the liability issue. What killed it was a few employies abusing the system. I built a lot of boards up for my early 11s and a few others from material gotten from salvage. The boards I got were easily fixed or like the M8044s by filling the unpopulated rows I upped them from 16kw to 32kw. They were in salvage because no one wanted 16kw cards anymore. That allowed me to have 256kb of ram in my first 11/23. The cost to deliver service has always been a problem and during the 80s is was something to be managed as margins could be tight. People wanted uptime, low cost and systems were smaller so they expected their bills to shrink accordingly. Designing a product for seviceability and service product that was manageable was quite challenging. Allison