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I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time was literally $10k in today's dollars, a
by b112 3y ago
I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time was literally $10k in today's dollars, at least that was the figure everyone talked about ($5k-ish).
I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron, wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even have solder tape, just a sucker.
I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side). The things people could never find out, never know, never even knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.
I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to know something, you literally could not find any info about it at all. You wouldn't even know what to ask, when you approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I lived, took weeks!
Such a culture shift.
But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire on end workaround.
- doctorhandshake 3y agoThis sentiment mirrors precisely how I think we might look back at a pre- augmented reality era if we can get an ‘AR web’ right. I write about it and advocate for it on my blog - this post in particular has some exposition on how I think AR could obviate keyword foraging, not knowing what questions to ask, and many other kinds of ignorance we take for granted today: https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/what-is-augmented-reality-for https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/what-is-augmented-reality-...
- doubloon 3y agoyeah like. people dont even understand. as a kid i would look at the content of .com files and .exe files in DOS and wonder why they didnt look like BASIC source code. wondering how the heck people made these wacky characters everywhere. had no idea what an assembler or a compiler was, and no way to find out. as far as hardware.. .at least there was radio shack and those little books by Forrest Mims. Maybe a book at the book store. unlikely. the idea of board level repair to me would have been like aliens describing a spaceship without a translator.
- tomduncalf 3y agoHahaha same here with the .com and .exe files. I had forgotten about that lol.
- makmanalp 3y agoI'm so glad someone else had the experience! Just being that combination of bored and curious that makes you open everything with notepad until you find something cool, clicking through windows registry entries and changing stuff to see if it does anything, then having your mind blown when you find a hex editor for the first time because you read some text file that shows you how to edit a specific value to cheat in a game .... then you kinda boggle at how they knew which value to edit. Then it takes you another 5-10 years to figure that one out. I do think I could have learned faster if I had a guide, but also not having one helped in its own weird way.
- doubloon 3y agoyeah i think... things are better now. people are still pushing those boundaries by poking at the unknown, and learning by exploring. like those people porting Linux to the Apple M chips. they have so many more resources so their exploration nowdays takes them so much farther than it did us back in the day trying to flip a bit in copy protection binary
- yterdy 3y agoWe're almost back. Search quality degradation has made finding even things you know exist significantly more difficult and time-consuming.