Admit it. When you’re cruising YouTube you sometimes get into some very weird things. Now, I’m not going to judge anyone and I’m not going to talk about some of the outright disturbing things you can find on the most popular video sharing site in the world. I’m just going to tell you about a particular rabbit hole I found myself going down, how it made me feel, and what I learned about the technological history we all share.
YouTuber “TronixFix” has a whole channel where they buy old tech for super cheap and try to figure out if it can be restored to its previous life. You can find a lot of this sort of video if you look. Generally someone picks up some popular piece of tech from the late 20th century, takes it apart and cleans the outside using the “Retr0bright” technique, and tries to figure out why the inside isn’t working. Here’s another one from YouTuber “Odd Tinkering.”
This one’s almost ASMR-like (if you believe in that sort of stuff) in the way it silently tears apart and remakes all this old tech from our collective past.
I’ll admit that I like watching this sort of video. When I see really sad little pieces of gear like the photo above it kind of makes me sad. I remember when all this stuff was new and incredibly expensive. Now it’s mostly junk and the people who make these videos generally pick it up for a few dollars. I guarantee every one of these devices is the result of millions of dollars of development. Each one had its fairly short moment in the sun and was promptly dumped in a landfill or (hopefully) responsibly recycled.
I don’t think we should be tied down by our history, but I think that when it comes to the stuff from the late 20th century, a lot of it’s disappearing fast. These were the days before cloud storage, of course, and a lot of this tech is really not well maintained. I think about the hundreds of hours I spent writing code for home computers, all turned to dust because I didn’t care to save the old disks I wrote. I think about cassettes that turned into hissy messes, rotting CDs, and VHS tapes that never made the jump to DVD. And yet until recently I didn’t realize that the hardware itself is rotting almost as fast as the media it used.
Electronic equipment could technically last for hundreds of years if kept in good shape. Eventually, the traces in the circuit boards would oxidize due to heat, but other than that it’s amazing how durable this stuff is. You watch these YouTubes and you realize that 40-year-old computers are still very repairable and most of them work just fine.
That is, they would work just fine. When you talk about 20th-century hardware, there’s almost always one culprit that’s stopping this old tech from working. Since I spoiled the fun back in the heading above, yes it’s the capacitor.
A capacitor is a device sort of like a battery. A battery stores energy by changing the chemical state of some truly toxic stuff inside its metal cylinder. A capacitor stores energy just by more or less giving the energy a place to sit and a relatively tight way to escape. Think about a bucket with a pinhole at the bottom and you basically have the idea of a capacitor. A capacitor will fill with energy over time and if you wait long enough, it will all drain out.
Now imagine that instead of a pinhole, you had a valve that would let all the energy out super fast. It still would have a tendency to leak out over time, but if you wanted a giant burst of energy real fast, you’d open the valve and it would all just blow out.
If you look at any circuit board from the 20th century you’ll see tons of these bad boys. They can be really tiny or really huge, depending on the need. And every single one of them, at least the ones of this design, will fail over time and maybe ruin whatever it’s attached to.
Apparently, capacitors from the 20th century had some sort of disgusting juice inside them. Over time, the capacitor would bulge and (by design) the goo would leak out slowly. It would get all over the circuit board. It could corrode the traces on the board or short the board. Sometimes, if you got lucky, a blown capacitor wouldn’t do any damage, it would just blow and need to be replaced.
So when you watch a lot of these videos, you see this over and over. You see capacitors that have leaked all over everything and that’s why the old circuit board doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s a battery that’s leaked, and that’s worse. But it seems that virtually every device had dozens of capacitors and sooner or later every one of them disappoints you.
That’s why every single one of these videos shows someone slowly and deliberately removing capacitors and replacing them.
If you have a lot of power you need to control, you might still use one of those old cylindrical capacitors. But more and more, you see these rectangular surface mount capacitors. They still fail, but they have less goo in them. Some of them, made of tantalum, are totally solid and don’t fail. I guess if you’re really into repairing these things you replace the old-school capacitors with tantalum ones and that’s a good thing.
It seems like some of the biggest names in electronics used capacitors that just blow after 20 years or so. And, it also seems like they knew it and didn’t care. Capacitors used to be a lot more expensive than they are, I guess – today you can get them for 10-20 cents. And so, engineers had to ask themselves how important it was that your electronics last 100 years. Apparently they usually decided it wasn’t important. That’s why all these old-school capacitors were used, and that’s why they blow and take so much computer history with them.
I’ll admit, back in 1984 I wouldn’t have imagined anyone caring about old computers by 2024. But, it seems I’ve said it in quite a few Throwback Thursday and Fun Friday articles lately. This old tech has nostalgia value. It was a joke when Back to the Future II showed a 1984 Mac in an antique store. The funny thing is, it’s becoming more and more real. It’s just another case of how the things we left behind in our past carry emotional weight. They carry so much, actually, that they become precious to us in the present.
The post FUN(?) FRIDAY: Capacitor deaths of the 20th century appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
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Start here.
YouTuber “TronixFix” has a whole channel where they buy old tech for super cheap and try to figure out if it can be restored to its previous life. You can find a lot of this sort of video if you look. Generally someone picks up some popular piece of tech from the late 20th century, takes it apart and cleans the outside using the “Retr0bright” technique, and tries to figure out why the inside isn’t working. Here’s another one from YouTuber “Odd Tinkering.”
This one’s almost ASMR-like (if you believe in that sort of stuff) in the way it silently tears apart and remakes all this old tech from our collective past.
My admission
I’ll admit that I like watching this sort of video. When I see really sad little pieces of gear like the photo above it kind of makes me sad. I remember when all this stuff was new and incredibly expensive. Now it’s mostly junk and the people who make these videos generally pick it up for a few dollars. I guarantee every one of these devices is the result of millions of dollars of development. Each one had its fairly short moment in the sun and was promptly dumped in a landfill or (hopefully) responsibly recycled.
I don’t think we should be tied down by our history, but I think that when it comes to the stuff from the late 20th century, a lot of it’s disappearing fast. These were the days before cloud storage, of course, and a lot of this tech is really not well maintained. I think about the hundreds of hours I spent writing code for home computers, all turned to dust because I didn’t care to save the old disks I wrote. I think about cassettes that turned into hissy messes, rotting CDs, and VHS tapes that never made the jump to DVD. And yet until recently I didn’t realize that the hardware itself is rotting almost as fast as the media it used.
The culprit: the capacitor
Electronic equipment could technically last for hundreds of years if kept in good shape. Eventually, the traces in the circuit boards would oxidize due to heat, but other than that it’s amazing how durable this stuff is. You watch these YouTubes and you realize that 40-year-old computers are still very repairable and most of them work just fine.
That is, they would work just fine. When you talk about 20th-century hardware, there’s almost always one culprit that’s stopping this old tech from working. Since I spoiled the fun back in the heading above, yes it’s the capacitor.
A capacitor is a device sort of like a battery. A battery stores energy by changing the chemical state of some truly toxic stuff inside its metal cylinder. A capacitor stores energy just by more or less giving the energy a place to sit and a relatively tight way to escape. Think about a bucket with a pinhole at the bottom and you basically have the idea of a capacitor. A capacitor will fill with energy over time and if you wait long enough, it will all drain out.
Now imagine that instead of a pinhole, you had a valve that would let all the energy out super fast. It still would have a tendency to leak out over time, but if you wanted a giant burst of energy real fast, you’d open the valve and it would all just blow out.
This is a capacitor.
If you look at any circuit board from the 20th century you’ll see tons of these bad boys. They can be really tiny or really huge, depending on the need. And every single one of them, at least the ones of this design, will fail over time and maybe ruin whatever it’s attached to.
Apparently, capacitors from the 20th century had some sort of disgusting juice inside them. Over time, the capacitor would bulge and (by design) the goo would leak out slowly. It would get all over the circuit board. It could corrode the traces on the board or short the board. Sometimes, if you got lucky, a blown capacitor wouldn’t do any damage, it would just blow and need to be replaced.
So when you watch a lot of these videos, you see this over and over. You see capacitors that have leaked all over everything and that’s why the old circuit board doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s a battery that’s leaked, and that’s worse. But it seems that virtually every device had dozens of capacitors and sooner or later every one of them disappoints you.
That’s why every single one of these videos shows someone slowly and deliberately removing capacitors and replacing them.
Today’s capacitors
If you have a lot of power you need to control, you might still use one of those old cylindrical capacitors. But more and more, you see these rectangular surface mount capacitors. They still fail, but they have less goo in them. Some of them, made of tantalum, are totally solid and don’t fail. I guess if you’re really into repairing these things you replace the old-school capacitors with tantalum ones and that’s a good thing.
Didn’t they know?
It seems like some of the biggest names in electronics used capacitors that just blow after 20 years or so. And, it also seems like they knew it and didn’t care. Capacitors used to be a lot more expensive than they are, I guess – today you can get them for 10-20 cents. And so, engineers had to ask themselves how important it was that your electronics last 100 years. Apparently they usually decided it wasn’t important. That’s why all these old-school capacitors were used, and that’s why they blow and take so much computer history with them.
I’ll admit, back in 1984 I wouldn’t have imagined anyone caring about old computers by 2024. But, it seems I’ve said it in quite a few Throwback Thursday and Fun Friday articles lately. This old tech has nostalgia value. It was a joke when Back to the Future II showed a 1984 Mac in an antique store. The funny thing is, it’s becoming more and more real. It’s just another case of how the things we left behind in our past carry emotional weight. They carry so much, actually, that they become precious to us in the present.
The post FUN(?) FRIDAY: Capacitor deaths of the 20th century appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
Continue reading...
