desoldering problems and technique (and amiga 2000 mod)

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:59 AM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote: This kind of thing makes me insane. I would have gladly paid another $1, or even $10, had they just put the parts on the board. I have a hard time believing (i.e. prefer to believe) that this would be purely a cost cutting move. I bet there real reason had to do with the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit add-on cards. With the introduction of the 5170, the form factor for ISA cards changed a bit. The cards got taller by about 3/4". This caused problems with the IBM PC-XT 286, which was a 286 machines with 16-bit slots crammed into a 5160 case, because the case wasn't tall enough. You could plug the 16-bit cards in and they'd work just fine, but you couldn't put the cover back on. :-P Another problem was that third party card makers could get a little more real estate by making the card drop down behind the 8-bit slot making the card about 3/8" taller. Later, when the 16-bit slots appeared, this drop-down interfered with the slot making the cards (structurally if not electrically) incompatible with the longer 16-bit slots. By leaving the 16-bit slot connectors off of the amiga 2000, they could accommodate these boards. And since the only bridge board available at the release of the 2000 was the 8086 bridgeboard which didn't connect to the 16-bit slots, no problem. But designing the motherboard to support it allowed them to add the connectors in later if needed should the market turn that way in a hurry. This is all speculation, but seems to make sense to me. brian