Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of the Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")
Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even on disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator, you could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had 17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line loading that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8 before calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss, immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea, about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.
So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you could connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...
I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in Old Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted 0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad? Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to his hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic parts store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or tripled the bill..
Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away society.
So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace them.
Larry Macionski