NikonWeb.com

...Only £1500-you could put it next to that early Apple that was mentioned here the other week!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... K:MEWAX:IT

_________________
DCS serial no. survey
EOS-1D Mk I & II, EOS*DCS-3 & 5, DCS, DCS-200ci, 420, 460, D1, D1H & X, D2H, E2, F, F2, F3, F4, RD-175, EF 50mm f/1.0, Audi S2, Porsche 911, GSX-R1000 K9

I can't imagine that it will sell (at this price). Will be interesting to follow.

Jarle

Hi,

Oh yes! I hope it sells!

I have piles and piles of all sorts of old IC's packed away. I know I have *at least* one 25 pc tube each of Intel 4004's! And, 6800's, 8008's, 6502s, Z80s, at least one tube of every TTL chip ever made. Plus all the various sizes of 3-voltage and 2-voltage and single-voltage memory chips, dynamic, static and even magnetic bubble!

If these once pedestrian, long outmoded ICs become worth piles of cash as museum pieces, then I'm going to be richer than if I won the lottery!

I kept some of absolutely everything ever used in microcomputers from the early days because I once did a sizeable sideline business repairing such things. In addition to the chips, I have lots of the other things, like some of every storage device from the old days.

You need a 1.2 MB 8" diskdrive for your IBM System Six or 5110, I have you covered! You need a 5 MB 5.25" harddrive for you Commodore PET, I have you covered. You need a 1 GB SCSI 3.5" harddrive for your IBM PS/2, one's available here. Mag tape drives of all kinds, read-write optical drives (like the IBM 3363), magneto-optical drives, card punches and readers, paper tape punches and readers. Lots and lots of now-ancient stuff.

I even have a few whole systems that I rigged up to perform media transfers. If you have an old program on paper tape (or punch cards), and wish it stuck onto a modern USB memory key, that I can do! I have to run it thru four systems to do it, but it can be done. My old IBM 5100 can read the paper tape, stick it onto an 8" diskette, then to the original IBM PC 5150 to go to 5.25" diskette, then to a PS/2 mod 95 to go to 1.44 MB floppy then to a fairly modern Thinkpad X31 to get to the memory key.

It's not that I ever thought these things would ever be anything other than ancient electronics. It's just that such things all had a time when good ones were available for free, I was fixing such things, and so known-good stuff got put into boxes on the shelf 'for later'.

Eventually, 'later' passed the stuff by, but it's still good and out of the way, and so I just let it be 'in case'. There are a lot more IC's packed away than the storage devices as chips are a lot smaller, all come in anti-static plastic tubes and never suffer from aging the way mechanical stuff does.

While I'm at it, I have all sorts of other electronic components as well. Old transistors, caps, resistors and the like. I even have a very large collection of vacuum tubes, which is something I use quite often as there is a lot if interest in resurrecting old radios from the 1950's and 60's these days.

But, I do hope that people go wild wanting old Intel 4004's. I'll auction of a couple of mine until the market goes soft and make some real money that'll make storing all this old crap really worthwhile!

Not that I'm about to hold my breath.

Later!

Stan

_________________
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

Wikipedia: "The Intel 4004 is one of the world's most sought-after collectible/antique chips. Of highest value are gold and white 4004s, with so-called 'grey traces' visible on the white ceramic (the original package type). As of 2005, such chips had reached around US$1000 each on eBay. The slightly less valuable white and gold chips without grey traces typically reach $300 to $500. Those chips without a 'date code' underneath are earlier versions, and therefore worth slightly more. More recently however, these vintage ICs have been dropping in value due to their relative abundance as the market is now flooded with surplus stock from sellers looking to cash in on the Intel craze."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004

An Intel 4004 was recently sold on eBay for $70, btw. Item 230419913194.

Jarle

I'd hang on to the 4004s if I were you , Stan... they required a few companion chips to operate properly, do you have those as well? I'm not sure what drives packrats like us, but Stan and I fall into the same boat. There are still some early diode-transistor logic chips from around 1972 laying around somewhere in my garage (DTL was a short lived logic family, wedged between RTL and TTL). I'm curious Stan, do you have a 1702 Eprom? Besides being the first commercially available Eprom, it had the distinction of being PMOS, and the memory cells read out zeros instead of ones when erased, unlike the NMOS and CMOS Eproms that followed. How about the RCA 1802 processor? The Mostek MK3870 with the eprom plug in? Lost and forgotten, but ahead of their time. Only true nerds would appreciate or collect this stuff. I'm impressed you managed to salvage some bubble memory from the 80's.

Most of my collection dates from the 80's onward. It includes most of the 7400/CD4000 varieties. I collected them the same the same way Stan did, it was called dumpster diving back then and frowned upon by management. Glad I kept a few of the old chips around. BTW, small quantities are available to anyone for the cost of postage if you write a nice letter and actually have a use for them. No guarantee they still work though.

- CAL

Hi,

Yes, I have some of the various support chips that go with most of those early uPs. Actually, the tubes into which I placed the parts are in sets - processor and support chips were pulled at the same moment and placed into the antistatic tubes.

I have a few of the very early EPROMs stashed away, most of which were pulls from machines which were being disassembled at the time. You know, anything with a socket was fair game!

I don't think I have any RCA 1802s, but there are some tubes with 'oddball' chips in them and so I might have one or two. Yes, I have some MK3870s which I kept *because* they took the plug-in EPROM and they're still plugged in.

I have all sorts of the early memory chips. Actually, I have the greatest quantity of the various memory devices, since those were what one usually needed to replace to fix something. It was a fairly rare situation to pop a processor, but fairly common to take out some of early multi-voltage memory chips.

I didn't exactly dumpster dive. I Junk Boxed. This means that as I worked on things, I tended to put stuff I wanted to save into a box 'for later'. Eventually, 'later' came and showed that a box full of stuff was now junk. I'd then simply 'clean up' the lab and take the oldest boxes home for 'disposal'. So, I always had a shelf of 'working junk' in the lab and it worked as a FIFO stack, as it were! (First-In, First-Out). Then, when it got home, it became a FINO stack - literally! (First-In, Never-Out)

Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Well, I didn't go digging thru the old FINO stack to dig out a few old processors and peripheral interface chips to then fire up an eBay auction. However, if a 4004 is $1k on eBay by itself, I wonder what a full chipset would fetch? Not that I really believe these reported prices. I mean, what would one *do* with a 4004 chipset anyway?

I got mine in the early 1980's because the things that used them were slow, useless pieces of junk that took up space. I kept them because I knew that I might need old parts like those to fix an old industrial process controller one day - the only things that used such chips by then that might be *worth* fixing! By 1990 I should have tossed them, but I didn't. The boxes are fairly small and don't take up that much space, so I've moved them three times since then.

I mean I could build up something that looked like a hobby microcomputer and sit there and watch it write cute sayings on a hexadecimal display, I suppose. Even the later 8080 and 6502 based machines which supported VDTs are useless these days. I have an OSI, an Apple II and an Atari 800, all of which are full, working systems and they sit on shelves, slowly gathering dust. The oldest machine I *might* have a use for is my IBM 5100 and then only if I ever needed to convert some industrial control program from paper tape or punch cards to something more modern.

Of all the old junk I have, I like that MOS Technologies KIM-I the best. It was worked up to operate an IBM Chord Keyboard and interface to an IBM 3278 display. At least that old 6502 based micro with 4k of RAM would still do something useful these days. If I happened to still have a 3278 attached to a mainframe and wanted to play with the chord keyboard, that is!

Actually, I still have several IBM 3270 display adapters *and* code for DOS and OS/2 that allow one to hook a 3270 display onto a PS/2. I also have ethernet cards for the PS/2, which allow them to hook to a modern network. So, I still could use that chord keyboard in a modern environment if I wanted. Now all I need is a 3278 or 3279. Too bad I didn't save one of those!

Well, maybe if I keep all this crap for another decade or so, I can sell it all for enough money to retire on! :p

Later!

Stan

_________________
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer