Early Honeywell boards were wire-wrap so they could easily be updated in the field. The board tester we had read test vectors from punched cards and stopped reading cards when it found a fault. The tester had a display for the card number. The FE looked up the test and card number and the chart said which chip had failed. It was not good at finding intermittent faults.
On Fri, Jul 4, 2025, 2:29 AM David Wade via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 03/07/2025 19:00, cz via cctalk wrote: > >> Same here. The FE came prepared with a replacement board. Never > >> repaired the board. > >> In and out! > > > > Well the Honeywell 6000 & Level 66 series machines > > https://gunkies.org/wiki/Honeywell_6000_series > > came with a board tester which was supposed to identify a faulty IC but > I can't remember how successful it was. I seem to remember L66 boards > were about 12"/30cms square and mostly TTL or MOS Memory. > the CE dropped the board into the tester which told him which chip to > change.. > I think the most changed chips were RAM. > > > Which makes sense. My guess is in the 80's 90's they would send the > > board back to a rework facility and repair it there. BGA/PGA is not > > too difficult to do if you have a good rework station, and the rest of > > the chips on the board were probably worth enough to make the rework > > totally feasable. > > > > By the mid 2000's, yeah they probably would just trash the board. > > > > C > > Dave >
