Probably. Luckily the 386 I just got didn’t have a varta battery. It was designed to have an alkaline battery attached via cable to the motherboard.

In defense of the designers though, they couldnt predict these would still be in use after 30-40yrs.

douglar wrote on Yesterday, 23:58:

Seems like average Varta damage is much worse now than it was 10 years ago. In 2016 it was usually just a little clean up here, a corroded trace there, if there was any damage at all. But 2026? When I find a board that still has a Varta on it, the 5 pin din is likely shot, probably a few of the decoupling capacitors are blue & fuzzy, multiple traces have completely evaporated and maybe a via or two is now full of something that’s not quite copper any more. Does this mean that the amount of newly salvaged 286, 386, and 486 boards may be getting close to zero soon?

To be expected, the leaky ones have had an extra decade to do their damage, and yeah it means that the number of boards with these batteries that can be salvaged will be considerably less than 10 years ago....imagine how bad itll be in another 10 years.

Thankfully we have a lot of dedicated people who can and do save these boards but we should keep in mind that we cannot save them all and every year that goes on means less to save. What we doo need is a repository where we can save detailed information about how to repair the damage and schematics of boards that have been repaired so people in the future have a place they can go and get detailed info on repairs from.

You also have to factor the environmental variables like humidity and heat, so the amount of damage these boards suffer from differs from board to board.