river25
Super Member
Exactly!
My first job was circuit board repairs, using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, multimeters and logic probes. Armed with the circuit diagram and a knowledge of the various operations of components, I fixed them.
We did repairs on linear and switching power supplies, computers (from PDP8s and up, Nova 2 & 3 minicomputers, plus 8080/8085, Z80, 8086 and 68000 processor based controllers) and it was down to the chip level. Back then we had a lot of bad tantalum caps. They've gotten better over the years, but in the mid-late 70s they had a very high failure rate.
Anyway my point is, by the time the mid 80s were coming around this sort of work was no longer financially viable. It became quicker and cheaper to do entire board replacements and chuck out the old board.
As hardware became more mass produced on a massive scale across the globe, exacerbated by SMD devices (and associated repair, flow solder equipment), and programmable arrays, hardware repairs (to that level) became cost prohibitive.
Any old computer/programmers on these forums may remember the days when 4K of RAM would cost about $1000! Hardware was very expensive and therefore cost effective to repair. Then over a decade the hardware became cheap and throw away but the software side then became very expensive. This is still true today. Back then we had to hand optimise code to fit into tiny and expensive memory. Now we just buy another cheap 4G RAM module. It is cheaper to throw hardware to get more performance rather than programmers time in optimising the code.
