Re:Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equ...
by rasz on Thursday July 15, 2021 @06:36PM
(#27850919)
Oh, the sweet innocence of someone who never looked inside electronics around him. Probably 1/10 of the products you ever owned shipped with some kind of factory bodge or went thru rework at the factory. That includes silly things like alarm clocks, VCR/DVD players, but especially expensive ($xx-xxxK) scientific equipment, airplane avionics, industrial control and medical devices.
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Re:Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equ...
by derefr on Thursday July 15, 2021 @07:55PM
(#27851549)
1960s mainframes were “field serviced” for processor errata by going out to every installation and hand-soldering some pre-planned bodge wires onto the boards, according to very detailed patch schematics.
And their backplanes were breadboards!
Re:Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equ...
by derefr on Friday July 16, 2021 @10:58AM
(#27856914)
For anyone who wants to see what I'm talking about, here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBssIIRGkOw) is a good video of a 1970s minicomputer (which is not a mainframe, yes, but generally built and maintained by the same vendors with the same repair strategies) being disassembled/reassembled. You can see plenty of bodge wires!
You can also see the 1970s evolution of the "breadboard blackplane" into "pseudo-ball-grid-array backplane, with arbitrary collections of bodge wires loosely mated to it via hand-crimped proto-Molex connectors." (The only difference in practice being that you could now plug/unplug a "group" of wires, rather than one at a time. There was still no screen-printed indication of where on the BGA grid to re-attach anything, since the grid wasn't customized to its purpose, but rather was still fundamentally a "generic routing board" in the same vein as a breadboard.)