7 Dec
2014
7 Dec
'14
9:54 p.m.
When I was at Living Computer Museum, we were using a
small pin that had a
socket (hole) in it. Solder N of those into the board after removing an
IC, and you'd never have to desolder another one - an important benefit
considering that some of these boards are losing integrity in the bonding
of copper to epoxy (or never had such integrity, e.g., Data General).
They're low profile (maybe a fraction of a millimeter higher than a
directly soldered-in chip), which can be crucial in some of the crowded
backplanes we see. ISTR that Mouser sells them. -- Ian
I've used them (Farnell -- so I guess Newark -- sell the Harwin brand) but they
obviously need a larger hole in the PCB than an IC pin on its own will go into.
And in a lot of cases the hole in the PCB is not large enough for these sockets
(obviously you can't drill out holes in a plated-through-hole PCB)
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised when working on an HP11305 disk
controller. That machine is tight inside. I removed the microcode ROMs to
dump them and realised that if I put 2 of them in sockets they would foul
the mains transformer (the other 3 were OK). Only after I had desoldered them
did I realise that the holes for those 2 were large enough for these little pin sockets
(I can't remember about the other 3, but I used normal sockets there anyway). So
one order later and all my ROMS were socketed. It appears that the 'old HP'
thought that people might want to socket their ROMs...
-tony