NOTICE FOR IBM XT OWNERS

[Tiido]

Modern tantalum capacitors have a fuse in them that prevents explosions. I'm not sure when this got introduced to the capacitors but probably already in the 90s for good brands. Drawback is you cannot easily tell if the part has failed and the system might develop weird issues without any visible signs.

[root42]

Modern tantalum capacitors have a fuse in them that prevents explosions. I'm not sure when this got introduced to the capacitors but probably already in the 90s for good brands. Drawback is you cannot easily tell if the part has failed and the system might develop weird issues without any visible signs.

Well, but that argument probably holds for any "safe" failure modes. If an electrolytic goes "boom" it will spew electrolyte over the board, which is not nice. If it fails silently, you have the same problem. I think we are trading better failure modes for more effort in diagnosing problems. But that will be a problem in 20-30 years, when today's caps start failing.

Until then I will have taught my daughters how to debug malfunctioning boards.

[The Serpent Rider]

If they were actually THAT bad, they wouldn't still be in use

Actually some top-tier modern motherboards use ONLY tantalum.