> On Jul 3, 2025, at 2:26 PM, Wayne S via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> That’s a good business practice anyway. You want your high price system up
> and running as fast as possible, so not having to do more than cursory
> diagnostics is a good thing I think deck realize that with the VAX and it’s
> remote the diagnostic capability as for the board breaks, IBM used to do that
> for all the boards they replaced. They even had a special board breaking tool.
> My CE from IBM said that it costs IBM more to diagnose a faulty board than it
> does to make a new one so that’s why they do it. Breaking the board also
> ensures that the engineers won’t get caught up in a side project trying to
> figure out what went wrong.
That's true for problems seen occasionally. When people realize a particular
issue appears "too often" it does become an engineering matter, because then it
indicates an issue with design or manufacturing or part selection.
For example, I remember a product that had a memory backup battery issue, which
turned out to be a change in plating for the battery holder. For engineering
it turned into an exercise in learning what "electrovoltaic series" means --
not something familiar to most digital logic EEs.
paul
