Minuteman

[GregShaw]

When I worked at Daystar Digital, they had little old asian ladies there soldering replacement traces on boards to fix logic and conductor issues on their Accelerator cards to account for chip changes. They could turn consumer units around for a processor or bug fix in a day or two including testing. A mix of refurbing old boards, component repair, proof testing and rebuilds could easily be done if not entirely uncheaply.

 

Wow, haven't heard anything about Daystar for about 2 decades. I so wanted one of their upgrade cards for my Mac IIci back in the day.

Edited June 16, 2019 by GregShaw

[DB]

if you've never had anything to do with safety-critical electronics, you'd be amazed and appalled at how slow the development process is.

 

It's quite possible for the the time taken between laying out a schematic for a design and buying in the components for a good percentage of them to have gone out of production.

 

It doesn't seem to be unusual for defence companies to take over key suppliers just to keep obsolete items going, or at least compatible parts being developed.

[Panzermann]

if you've never had anything to do with safety-critical electronics, you'd be amazed and appalled at how slow the development process is.

 

It's quite possible for the the time taken between laying out a schematic for a design and buying in the components for a good percentage of them to have gone out of production.

 

It doesn't seem to be unusual for defence companies to take over key suppliers just to keep obsolete items going, or at least compatible parts being developed.

 

I remember reading NASA buying lots of old stocks of out of production chips for the space shuttles, because they could not realisti cally replace them because of these loooong processes. I guess they do for other projects as well to not risk to run out of parts for a deep space probe or some such.

[rmgill]

 

When I worked at Daystar Digital, they had little old asian ladies there soldering replacement traces on boards to fix logic and conductor issues on their Accelerator cards to account for chip changes. They could turn consumer units around for a processor or bug fix in a day or two including testing. A mix of refurbing old boards, component repair, proof testing and rebuilds could easily be done if not entirely uncheaply.

 

Wow, haven't heard anything about Daystar for about 2 decades. I so wanted one of their upgrade cards for my Mac IIci back in the day.

 

Yeah they had some sexy hardware in the day. The neatest I handled was the Nubus RAM disk card. 256 megs of ram max iirc, but you could parallel several of them, throw a basic system folder in it, set the RAM disk as a the start up drive and then boot off the ram Disk lightning fast. It was all that we get from SSD's today with bog standard RAM SIMMs. Net from a tech perspective, really cook for folks doing HEAVY computation between a data base file and ram.

 

They were a touch disorganized however which is why I couldn't stand working for them for more than a month.