DEC troubleshooting

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Thu Nov 5 22:15:41 1998

< Yes, they did, with red tags on them supposedly describing the fault
< to help someone diagnose and fix the boards. But many of them simply
< ended up in salvage, which many of us used to visit each week to
< find stuff for our home systems. At that time (more than a decade

salvage was for "excess" and junked. Boards there were either plentiful
and therefor costly to store the excess or they were out of rev. Also
boards or FRUs that were not in reve and not upgradeable were
salvaged. Sometimes there were boards that went through the depot
repair cycle twice and were considered unreliable.

< I miss salvage...

As the cost of materials and the economics of depot repair became
attractive so there was less and less material going to salvage. Also
the liability issue. What killed it was a few employies abusing the
system.

I built a lot of boards up for my early 11s and a few others from
material gotten from salvage. The boards I got were easily fixed or
like the M8044s by filling the unpopulated rows I upped them from
16kw to 32kw. They were in salvage because no one wanted 16kw cards
anymore. That allowed me to have 256kb of ram in my first 11/23.

The cost to deliver service has always been a problem and during the 80s
is was something to be managed as margins could be tight. People wanted
uptime, low cost and systems were smaller so they expected their bills
to shrink accordingly. Designing a product for seviceability and service
product that was manageable was quite challenging.

Allison
Received on Thu Nov 05 1998 - 22:15:41 GMT