Today's equipment has a lot more embedded devices such as FPGAs and microcontrollers - so it's going to be a lot more difficult to rework these parts and get fi

Today's equipment has a lot more embedded devices such as FPGAs and microcontrollers - so it's going to be a lot more difficult to rework these parts and get firmware updates. Some parts might not be programmable in the field (i.e. they need updated before they get soldered onto the board). So I think the romantic days are gone for a reason.