Old computers did it better!

[grsbanks]

I don't remember too many problems with the CIA chips, strangely enough. The SID was definitely a weak point in those machines, as was the VIC.

In the Amiga 500 and 600, it was indeed almost always the chips that drove the I/O (8520? This was 30 years ago and I've slept since then) or the floppy drive that needed changing. Close runners up were a leaky NiCd battery in the A501 memory extension and a fault in the power supply where the 470K resistor between the +400V hot side and the base of the switching transistor that just became an open circuit so the oscillator never started => no power.

The Atari ST family of machines (we were also an Atari centre) were generally more reliable except that the ROM chips often needed re-seating in their sockets and their floppy drives were a bit of a nightmare. Worst thing about them was the fact that Atari kept on changing the design of them so there was a good chance that a new floppy drive ordered from them would not fit in the case of the machine you had with its guts open on your workbench. The STE machines often had the same power supply fault as the Amigas but by far the most common fault was hilarious.

The STF had an MMU chip and another logic chip that they called the GLUE chip. The STE combined the two into a single 144-pin SMD. The glue that they would use to stick it to the motherboard before passing it through the solder wave would corrode the copper tracks below the chip. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out the cause of the first machine I saw to exhibit the problem!