🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Sep11.0...@lavaca.uh.edu> j...@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) writes:
>In article <141...@hp-vcd.HP.COM> jo...@hp-vcd.HP.COM (John Eaton) writes:
>>With some of the early micros it
>>was SOP to clean the leads of all socketed IC's whenever the system started
>>to flake out.

Or at least push the chips back into the sockets!  Back on my TRS-80
(the good ole days :-)  Model I, of course!) the BASIC ROMs were on the
underneath the keyboard and gravity would tend to pull them out over
time.  The interesting thing about it was that the major symptom was
the builtin functions (eg: CHR$()) acted like they were arrays of
DIMension 10 (the default without an explicit DIM statement) instead of
functions.  Other than that (if I recall it correctly), the machine
acted fine.


>Was there ever any real field-proof that gold-edge contacts are
>better than <x>-edged contacts?  I remember it used to be a big
>deal, but I haven't heard much about it recently.

I still have a hard time believing in that, considering that the gold
came off by merely connecting the connectors.


>first things the support tech said to do was clean all of the
>card edges with an eraser.

Reminds me of the time that we were visiting one of the Plato labs down
at the U of Illinois.  The Avatar players, er, uh, I mean STUDENTS :-)
were complaining that all of the terminals in the room were acting
wierd.  We opened the connector box, and found half an inch (no
exaggeration) of dust on the connectors.  It amazed me that the
terminals worked at all!  The "new" sticker on one of the boards in the
box gave us a chuckle, too.
-- 
	NEVIN ":-)" LIBER
	ne...@igloo.scum.com  or  ..!gargoyle!igloo!nevin
	(708) 831-FLYS
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