The only thing worse than that is when those things are soldered and not in a DIP socket. They still make them (or a compatible version) by the way, sealed battery and all.

Ah yes. I've had to repair one of the Dallas ICs before. You have to dig out a dremel and bite down till you get to the metal then add some hook up wire. Unlike OP I chose to use rechargable batteries that used to be used for home wireless phones - they are the right voltage and often they supply a battery charger.

If you're lucky you can desolder the the old battery and use a couple of pin headers to get you back up and running. I do find it irritating some retro machines wont even boot without a working battery.

Yeah, those are a thing on old Sun workstations. They have a clock and they also store a small amount of data.

https://www.sun3arc.org/FAQ/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.phtml

I remember replacing one in the mid 1990s. The machine's ethernet address is stored on this chip, and I believe it's battery-backed RAM (not flash, EEPROM, etc.), so when the battery dies, the data on the chip is lost.

When you install a new chip, you need to program in the ethernet address so the machine can get on the network. The proper thing to do is use the factory-assigned ethernet address to ensure that it is unique. But you can't get the address from the old chip. So, like many people, I just picked some random numbers. It worked.

Necroware has a replacement design for Dallas RTCs: https://github.com/necroware/nwX287

I don't know why there is a replacement design. You can still buy them new from Mouser. They last 20 odd years usually.

Is this some attempt to get around "contains batteries" shipping restrictions, since if anyone looks inside it'll just be like any other chip and there's no way to tell unless you start googling part serials lmao.

"No batteries here, officer! Move along."

I'm not sure if it's worse, since AFAIK these don't leak. I have a IBM PS/2 system that I inherited that I plan to restore some day. Sure it's a pain but glad there was no damage to the board.

Dedication and a cutter knife do it. I did it myself, twice.

Once while it was soldered into a mainboard :P

There were lots of test equipment with variants of those, and unlike CMOS settings, they held critical calibration constants.

>no way

you drill/dremel in two spots, solder tow wires and you are done.

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-10-renovat...

You can also heat them up, making the resin brittle so you can chip it away and replace the battery.