24 Feb
2008
24 Feb
'08
3:02 p.m.
On Sunday 24 February 2008 14:16, Tony Duell wrote:
Agreed! This is something I've done for a number of decades, now, and it's
hardly a marketable skill these days, not at all around here, unless I
wanted to find a position dealing with RF or other similar areas that are
unfortunately outside of my area of expertise.
On Feb 23,
2008, at 12:46 PM, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
I would argue that component-level repair _is_ rapidly becoming a lost art. 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 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).
When we had our shop (which we closed in 1992), getting good service info on
things even back then was a real hassle at times.
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...
It seems to require some detailed level of understanding of how stuff works,
that level of detail being too often omitted in what info you do get. I have
something, it has an ASIC in there, fine -- just tell me how it's supposed
to _act_ in the circuit! But no, that's too much trouble...
Damn throwaway economy! :-(
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin