[HECnet] No connectivity to arsgea 4

[Johnny Billquist]

Speaking of things like 74-series stuff. Based on various restoration 
projects I'm aware of, there seems to be a huge difference in quality of 
those ICs. Depending on manufacturing batch, and manufacturer...

Some never fail, while with some others, you can almost predict that 
they will be non-functional now.

So I guess it also do depend a bit on who you picked as supplier back in 
the day.

   Johnny

On 2021-01-23 18:40, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On 1/23/21 11:54 AM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>> Well, as a matter of fact, I myself told myself this, based on my 
>> anecdotal experience of 45 years in the field.
> 
>    In that case, please stay far, far away from soldering irons. ;)
> 
>> Even with moving parts, 'professional' equipment will typically last 
>> longer than consumer.  I have a highly venerable IBM X8668 server from 
>> about 2000 that is fine, yet it has moving parts; a six drive RAID 5 
>> and the fans.  Those drives have never broken; I think we've had to 
>> blow out a fan.
> 
>    Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
> 
>    A funny story about that.  In a large ISP environment in the 
> mid-1990s, suits smelled money and started infiltrating the company.  Of 
> course, the predictable thing happened, everything went to shit.  Part 
> of that process, though, was amusing.  The suits whined and whined about 
> "all of these overpriced Sun Microsystems computers that we've never 
> heard of". (we had over two thousand of them at that point)  They whined 
> that a PC costs $300, so why should we be buying $15,000 Sun computers?
> 
>    So they started buying PCs, just a few, maybe a dozen.  The $300 
> price they'd mentioned before was for eMachines garbage at Best Buy, but 
> what they actually ended up buying were monstrous $20,000 Compaq 
> ProLiant machines.  About 25% of the computing power in 5x the rack 
> space at a higher price, wow what a great decision!  Idiot suits.  At 
> least they didn't break very often...only about twice as often as the 
> SPARCs.
> 
>    So they quoted what they COULD spend on PC hardware, but not what 
> they DID spend.  That's suit logic for you.  The company is not long for 
> this world when processor architecture becomes a business decision.
> 
>    Of course the new carpet-bagger VP's whole family suddenly went to 
> Tahiti for two weeks after the Compaq sales guy landed the sale, so we 
> knew what had transpired.
> 
>> However, I should qualify this with the fact that the unit was almost 
>> never shut off ever for over 12 years and was on a triply redundant 
>> conditioned power supply during all that time.  So, no power up 
>> flexing, Etc.  As a matter of fact, any machine that I care about here 
>> is on a conditioned power supply (at least an APC Smart UPS).  My 
>> remark might have been better put in that context; the power up surge 
>> flexing is what eventually will do anything in.
> 
>    That's a good approach.  The power-up surge flexing, as you aptly put 
> it, is damaging to this type of hardware.  However, just plain age, when 
> it comes to components, is the larger problem as things start to get 
> very old.  I know this from learning about how the components actually 
> work, but my repair area's trash can, chock full of failed capacitors 
> and 7400-series ICs, is literally a bucket of data in support of it. ;)
> 
>    We have quite a lot of very old computer hardware at the museum, and 
> we repair and maintain nearly all of it.  I've been repairing stuff all 
> my life (I bought myself a new bike as a kid by fishing broken TVs out 
> of dumpsters, then fixing and selling them), but that really kicked into 
> high gear with the construction of the museum.  As far as failure modes 
> in electronics, I think at this point we've pretty much seen it all over 
> there.
> 
>> To be fair, you're not the first person who has retorted to me about 
>> my squatness with regards to electronics, my brother (who does the 
>> hardware support) being very high on that particular list.  I'm quite 
>> happy (often delighted) to blithely reply, "Yeah...  They don't do 
>> much without me programming them, do they?"
> 
>    ROFL!
> 
>              -Dave
> 

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol