Updates and Obsolescence

[RobertoBozzolo]

Just to take this discussion out the quaint and quirky world of diskettes... 

It seems to me that "obsolescence" must be considered carefully when speaking of technological equipments. Let we consider for example a simple charge/discharge equipment for tests on accumulators. Such equipment can be made of three main components: a power supplier, an array of power transistors driven in parallel to achieve desired working conditions and a driving system to take care of all that.

Additionally, take a set of such units and put them in a single cabinet to minimize the cost per unit.

30 years ago such equipment would be built in fully analogue manner: some electronic card with sets of amplifies, complicated filters to achieve stability, potentiometers, electromechanical timers to set working cycles, analog or digital instruments on the front panel, push buttons, lamps...

This equipment in clearly obsolete now (actually it would be also 15 years ago, but let we ignore this for the moment...).

The most radical way of taking care of this obsolete equipment can be to simply dispose of it and buy a new one, but this may not be the best cost/benefit solution.

A viable alternative can be to simply replace the control system with a modern one, thus saving all power components which can continue working for another several years (together with housing, cooling fans, cabling, mains switch and all other neglected components that still represent a significant percentage of machine cost...)

Obviously this alternative must be considered individually for each equipment knowing its history and characteristics, actual working state and what the customer is asking for; I'm not saying that no equipment can actually be retired, I'm simply saying that there can be valid alternatives with reduced cost that sometimes can be considered and offered to customers.

In my experience customers are normally very careful in planning their investments and when considering the replacement cost of some equipment take care of several aspects that we technicians may tend to disregard focusing on technological aspects only;

[johnsold]

Good points, Roberto.  I worked as the Instrumentation Engineer at a university with a significant research emphasis, although not classified as a major research university. My job was support of all the research instruments across the campus, from stir plates to nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers.

A university typically buys a new instrument when a faculty member obtains a grant to pay for it. The small equipment (like the stir plates) is never budgeted for replacement. While the wisdom of such policies may be debatable, that is the way many schools work.

Since my department was supported (minimally) as an overhead line item in the budget and we could not bill the researchers for our time, we got pretty good at reverse engineering old instruments and creating replacments for the obsolete parts.  A nice LV program and a DAQ board can replace a lot of obsolete electronics in a spectrometer. The mechanical and optical parts often needed nothing more than cleaning and lubricating, while the vacuum tube electronics were not worth fixing. The worst cases were instruments with computers embedded on the main circuit board. The computer was so intricately interconnected with the custom electronics that it was not feasible to reverse engineer the mess. 

Lynn