Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Fixing 1960s and 1970s electronics is hard. But they're fixing IBM's good stuff, not junk.

It's rare to see a transistor opened up today to see what went wrong. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the USAF did that on occasion. The USAF had a project, the Air Force Reliability Program, to make electronics more reliable. About 1% of the electronics boxes in the USAF were stickered with a note like "USAF Reliability Program - do not repair in the field, replace and ship back to ..." Back at Reliability Program HQ, technicians would figure out exactly what had broken and document it. All the way down to the individual component level and below. Transistors would be opened up and photographed under a microscope to see exactly what went wrong. They found problems like this bad transistor in the 1401, where a lead wasn't attached properly.

The USAF followed up by naming and shaming manufacturers. Microphotographs of bad parts were published in Aviation Week. Parts got better.

I expected the debugging session to end when they identified the transistor that was bad, but these guys were dedicated!

I've never seen a transistor can opened like that. I love how it's essentially just a shrunken down version of the very first transistor ever made[1]

Great story about the USAF. It's a shame that circuitry is essentially a black box nowadays.

1: https://physics.aps.org/assets/c5065b1e-4bf2-4501-a05b-6a841...

A transistor is just as much of a black box, only incredibly simpler.

You can decap hardware today in roughly the same way, and given of course enough time, understand it, and eventually control it.

These days decapping involves sandpaper and a magnifying glass.

Most likely acid. Sandpaper will destroy whatever you are trying to decap if you get close.

Used to be able to burn the package off with a torch and leave the chip somewhat unscathed. I hate to think of the chemicals I was exposing myself to when I did that as a kid, though.

> It's a shame that circuitry is essentially a black box nowadays.

Yeah, quite a shame that we have high speed low power electronics today. I pine for vacuum tube computers.

You get my point. Most advances come at a cost. The cost in this case is worth it.

Vacuum tube machines computed with more pleasing harmonics, resulting in the output having a richer, warmer sound.

And we all know that germanium is waaaaay better than silicon in your diodes and transistors.

I just installed a germanium Dallas-Arbiter Fuzzy Logic unit, and boy did I ever see some benchmark improvements

Oh, God, "germanium Dallas-Arbiter Fuzzy" isn't just word salad ...

I'm dying over here ...

How much HP exactly? If I put one in my Civic does it mount on the trunk-wing bleacher seat spoiler or to the muffler resonator tip?

And have you ever tried to compute the "Pride and Joy" algorithm using a silicon-based computer? Exercise in futility, to say the least.

> Fixing 1960s and 1970s electronics is hard. But they're fixing IBM's good stuff, not junk.

Depends. I found my various Tektronix pieces quite easily repaired, with insights gained. But then again their documentation is quite good.

Tektronix was over the top on quality. Ceramic terminal strips, silver solder, and all the component color codes facing in the same direction. They even put a little spool of silver solder inside the scope in case you had to make repairs. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvbNBZX6kNE

On top of that, if a board has utterly gave up the ghost and let the magic smoke out there's still a large market for donor boards, probably owing to the fact that they were such well built, documented, and repairable pieces of equipment.

Tektronix is a scientific instrument company that happened to get into computer peripherals. You could bet their gear was rock solid, and designed for engineers to poke at.

Like the mid 1970s Tektronix 4014 storage tube graphics display terminals. Saw one that was retired but still operational in early '00s used originally for CAD. Interesting how back then you could draw a circle in a box then morph the box (using scroll wheels) into a rectangle to form an ellipse.

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