28 May
2003
28 May
'03
3:07 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Dwight K. Elvey once stated:
I think these older machines are easier to work on. Things
are more exposed and excessable. Most of the newer machines
one has today are not even as repairable( motherboard fails,
swap out motherboard! ).
As much as I hate to say this, but isn't this inevitable? Take, for
instance, a homebrewed 6502 system---a gate in one of the 74xx series chips
blows, you can't repair the chip, unlike say, a PDP-1 where the offending
transistors/diodes can be repaired in the single blown gate. So you have to
toss *the entire chip* and replace it.
Replacing a card (or motherboard) is that, only writ large.
And I see the beginnings where if some component on the computer fails,
you replace the computer (I would imaging this happens at Google with their
multi-thousand PC clusters).
-spc (Not that I like this, but I see this as a trend ... )