Socket to Me?

[Jim Horn]

Back in the early personal computer days (late 1970s), having every chip on a board socketed was the mark of a superior product as the chips were known to fail. As such, many things like my Apple ][ Plus had all 110 or so chips in sockets. Great!

But then, over time, the dissimilar metals of the socket contacts against the IC pins could slowly corrode or otherwise end up with intermittent contact. My Apple eventually degraded to a mean time between failures of under an hour. Only opening it and firmly pressing down on all 110 chips to reseat them would restore it to health. For a little while.

I was planning on desoldering all few thousand socket pins from the board and soldering the chips in directly while replacing many of them with lower power CMOS ones for reliability. Instead the whole thing was given away to someone who needed it.

Connectors are nature's way of making sure reliability doesn't get too high - and IC sockets are connectors... Good for chips that will need swapping (EPROMs and such), not so much otherwise.