On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:54:35 -0700, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

None of these have had any electrolytics fail, so far as I know. So what
gives? Am I just lucky? Did the manufacturers use higher-quality caps
than what's commonly used today?

Chuckle 2.0. Statistics time. Let's pretend that a large quantity of
old electrolytic capacitors were defective. In that case, they would
have died long ago, been recycled, leaving only the good electrolytic
capacitors. 30 years later, all you see are good working ancient
equipment. Not having seen the older blown caps, you might presume
that all ancient electrolytics are reliable over a long term.

There's also a question of quantity. There are probably several
orders of magnitude more capacitors in today's devices than in
yesterdays older equipment. Given the larger number of capacitors,
and ignoring the bad electrolyte horror, one might presume that
today's caps are little better than garbage due to a high failure
rate. However, the failure rate is probably (my guess) the same as it
was 30 years ago, it's just that there's more of them today. Wait 30
years, and the survivors will sure be proclaimed the ultimate in
quality, when compared to the next generation of molecular or atomic
scale electronic devices.

Incidentally, I have a 486DX2/66 and Conner 1Gbyte SCSI HD in my
palatial office, running SCO Open Desktop 3.2v4.2 since about 1990.
The PS blew up at one point and I've blown 2 CPU fans, but otherwise,
it's much the same today as it was 19 years ago. From this evidence,
do I deduce that the older motherboards, hard disks, and operating
systems are more reliable than today's equivalents?

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558