The lifespan of technology

I have a BMW K75. Many reading this probably don't know
what an interesting motorcycle this. The model I have was built in
1992, yet has computer controlled port fuel injection and independent
front and rear ABS. The motor sits on it's side, longitudinally, and
has three cylinders. The rear wheel is a mono-lever, single shock
shaft drive. While none of those are by themselves groundbreaking,
finding them all on a motorcycle from this era is rare. In fact, even
by 2011 standards, all those features are quite uncommon to find on
the same machine.

So, the bike came to me in 2002 when I bought it used from a guy in
NOVA. Almost everything on the machine worked in top
form, but I got a "steal", probably a few thousand under blue book,
because the ABS computer was dead and a replacement cost well over
$1000. But I gambled, bought the machine, and within a month I'd
found a BMW moto graveyard part for $250 and suddenly had a fully
functional ABS system, and pretty much flawless moto.

So imagine my sadness when about a month ago, the ABS computer croaked again. Nine years later, with this bike now being nearly 20 years old, the used part market was barren. The few used ABS brains I saw were in the $450-600 range. New ones now list for $1600, if you find someone that has any in stock. Turns out, this part is the Achilles heel of the BMW ABS systems from this generation, and they are tough to get. I had probably been lucky even in 2002 to get one as cheaply as I did.

Trying to keep the story short, I found a japanese guy mentioned in an
older BMW moto list serve as being able to repair the ABS computers,
and a few modified googles later located him online. Of course I was
concerned he might be offline (or worse) due to the tsunami, but
luckily that was not the case.

This initial email was sent June 5, and he wrote me back within 24
hours. He lives in a more southern part of the country (sort of near
Hiroshima) and said he still did such repairs, just send it over!

I used one of the fixed-rate USPS international boxes and off it went
to Japan.

Four days later, he wrote that he had the ABS. (How this is possible for $14 I don't understand, but it's good). He claimed to have quickly
found a loose thru-hole connection on the circuit board that was
causing the failure. He repaired this, took the computer for a test
spin in his K100, and reported all to be well. He asked for 14,500
yen and said he'd send it back when he got the $$.

That was about $180US the day I paypal-ed it over, and he wrote back a day later that he'd shipped it.

It arrived this morning, ten days after I originally shipped it, and is already installed (and working fine) back in my K75. He says he tested "everything" on it and if anything goes bad within a year, he fixes it again for shipping only.

Anyway, like I said, probably only interesting to a few people. But I
thought it was cool. And also rare - how many high-tech things, as
they age, must be discarded simply because no one knows how to fix
them? Even a simple problem, such as this thru-hole connection
breaking, or a bad cap, or a million other little repairable things
can go wrong...but "it isn't worth it" to fix them. I'm smiling
because my bike is fixed, I saved a bunch of $$, but mostly because I
know there's someone out there that still cares to understand and fix
things instead of just junking them.

On top of it all, it was possible to do all this in less than two
weeks? It's easy to think about tsunami's and nuclear meltdowns being
on the other side of the planet. How does that effect me? Well, the
other side of the planet is, really, right around the corner.