24 Feb
2008
24 Feb
'08
11:16 a.m.
On Feb 23, 2008, at 12:46 PM, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
I would argue that component-level repair _is_ rapidly becoming a lost art.
Apart from people on this list (and it's not even universal here) and people
doing related hobbies like vintage radio repairs, component-level repair
is alas very rare now. Even TV repairs (at least in the UK) have become
board-swapping with the advent of the plasma panel and LCD TVs (most
manufactuers of such sets do not supply schematics, and don't supply the
ASICs other than on the PCB).
What's more worrying to me is that the ability to diagnose a fault seems
to have gone as well. We've had this rant to many times that I don't feel
like starting it again...
anyone do or know of anyone doing repairs on
vaxstations?
is this a lost art, and I should just buy another one off ebay or what?
I'd love to find someone who did hardware repairs/engineering for dec
or still knows the stuff.
It's far from a lost art; anyone with reasonable electronics skills can work on those machines. The problem is the lack
of in-depth
hardware documentation like schematics.
YEs, AFAIK there were never published schematics for the VAXstations. And
since (from the few I've looked inside) they're full of custom silicon,
it's going to be very hard to produce meaningful schematics of such
machines.
For a machine built drom known components (ICs you can get data sheets or
at least pinouts for, etc), it's possible (although a lot of work [1]) to
trace out the schematics. But II don't fancy doing it for a machine where
the pinouts of the CPU and the main support ICs are unknown.
[1] That is the voice of experience...
-tony