I could kick myself. I tossed out thousands of chips.

[OldTech]

I just discovered this site and perhaps I should just shoot myself.

I'm an old (well not that old) retired Eng. and basically left the aerospace industry behind me. I had/have a large lab in my basement that held a collection of many thousands of discrete and integrated electronic parts until just recently. Some parts dating back to the very early days of solid state electronics including many early processors. Hell I even have/had some tubes.

Over the last couple of years I have been cleaning house so to speak and have simply tossed out a large part of my inventory, including I'm positive, several different vintage 4004's, early integrated circuits, other cpu's, many early ceramic eproms like 2708's-16's-32's and peripheral support chips, etc. Starting from the late 1960's-70's-80's and later.

So as I sit here with a tear in my eye and some of you perhaps are cringing at the thought someone would do this. My only excuse would be the powerful drugs that I must take, that have weakened my mind to not check on the net and the reason I had to retire and close my company in the first place.

The good news to a degree perhaps, is that I hadn't yet disposed of many parts. Simply because I hadn't finished the job and some logic and linear parts, 8080, z80's I felt I may still use in small projects or repairs, along with all the other discrete parts that went into design work I used to do. I was a pack rat of sorts. The bad news is, I have no idea what I have. Some chips are well sorted, but others are just in boxes mixed with other electronics junk. I still even have a nice DEC H-217c, 16k core memory card ready for framing, when I get around to it.

Going beyond the fact that my retirement and the closing my company was sudden an unexpected. It left me rather poor, living off my savings and a small Gov. disability pension. Oh and kicking my wife out to work each day. I could use some help.

Here is my quandary. I have no idea what I have or what value some parts may have. Hindsight is wonderful and at one time I had enough duplicates of some items, that I could have easily shared here as well as sold others off. But with what is left, it looks perhaps that I would need some assistance from a member or two in identifying those left that have some value and in exchange for that help perhaps help out some collector(s). Assuming of course that I still have some parts of value to sell off.

I've been looking around the site this morning to see what I may learn. I've never considered that my collection might help me out with a little cash in my pocket, but I'm not just out for the money. I figure that over the next year (especially once summer is over) that perhaps an arrangement can be made with someone here, that has the experience I need to assist me, in doing this properly. In kind, I would return the favour in trade, from what I may have, that this person(s) would like for their collection. Maybe even help this site in some way. Is there any interest from some of the senior members here to assist me?

So for example: Are parts like a ceramic Mostek MK3880P Z80cpu Malaysia 7951. Or a ceramic Motorola MC6820L 7635M (bibs), worth anything to collectors?

[wepwawet]

Hi OldTech,

yeah, I guess there are many like you biting themselves in the ... for what they junked somewhen.
I'd suggest that you take a few pictures of, let's say all white ceramic DIP chips, all flat packs, all "military" if you still have some.

Your examples are unfortunately nothing special, I offered a Mostek Z80 last week on ebay at BIN 20 Euro, noone interested, lol

Where do you live?

Best, Michael

[kosmokrator]

anyway....nice story...
and of course some body (including me)
will interested on your chips ...common or uncommon im sure for this...

wellcome to the forum..
all we are old-tech lovers here......

[Chiefish]

Hi and welcome to the forum Old Tech.
Ide suggest doing like Wepwawet said and post some pictures of what you have, That will take most of the mystery out of what chips they are and what condition they are in. I am positive that every one here will be able to help in identifying and giving approximate values for every chip you can throw at us. Some will be worth a good chunk others not so. But without seeing them its hard to judge. I even have a pretty good reference of alot of the desirable chips being sold on Ebay have gone for over the last several months and have them all archived for reference. So post away and lets see what ya got.

[magictom]

Welcome OldTech. You story is too bad.

Just a quick tip: If you have access to a scanner, scan the parts rather than taking photos with a camera. The quality of scans is usually much better and it's A LOT more efficient.

Also, I could give you some feedback on (60s) ICs, as compared to (70s) CPUs

[Guest]

Thanks for the welcome guys. I'll take the advice. That scanner idea also sounds like it's worth a try over the camera. My camera is just a cannon S series and not so good on closeups.

I do have a lot of reference books and could identify most of them as per function. More interested in value. However I'm sure I also have some give away types. A lot of what is left and cataloged are are general logic and linear ones. thing like cmos 4001 and up and 54, 74, 74LS00 and up. General purpose stuff that you can still buy today new although less often in the DIP packages.

The Larger scale integration I remember less as to function but still have books. Most of the Ebay links I found in this forum had stale dated unfortunately.

So here is the way I see my effort in this. As someone asked my location and it relates. I'm in Canada Michael and with summers being so short I'm not likely to do a lot of digging over the summer except on rain days I like to get outside in the summer as I'm more of a shut-in in the winter and so that is when I have the motivation to dig around. The stuff I really need to dig out is the time consuming part and more likely to be the older chips as well. I really don't know what's left until I move a bunch of boxes around. I ave a horrible feeling I have thrown out the oldest and best by today's standards.

But I'll rummage around the sorted stuff and see what maybe hidden away. I'll see if I can put up a few samples later tonight or in the morning.
Like this one I just found. White Ceramic RCA CA3045 I'm not sure but that might be an old amplifier. I guess I could go look it up but it's not to often you see the old white ceramics around. I'll include that in the scan. I have 5 of them and all are likely functional as they were stored on antistatic foam.

I guess I should register if I'm getting serious about doing this. I'll get to it later as well.

[magictom]

I'm interested in seeing your ceramic CA3045 (monolithic transistor array).

Another quick tip: IMHO, one of the best websites to look up old ICs/chips is

http://www.datasheetarchive.com/

. They have a lot of old data books scanned as PDFs. At the same time many of us are also interested in hard copies, so please don't throw them out LOL

[CPUShack]

You can redeem yourself by posting pics

I am sure you still have some goodies.

of your CMOS/TTL, the ones that tend to have the most value are the ALUs (74181,381, etc)

[JAC]

Welcome to the forum, I look forward to seeing what you dig out. I have a keen interest in early display technology, specifically Nixie tubes and any crazy display tube/technology, other than LED or LCD.

[Terry]

Well let's see. Having an issue getting the files down to 256k this forum allows as upload and yet still be readable. This may take longer than I figured to get the pics and may host somewhere else.
The pics I'm attempting to post relate to what numbers I posted before and the rest of the chips from that same set of two bins. I tossed in a Cyrix just because it was on the shelf. So I'll get back to this. I don't do picture much and my compression still leaves 1.3meg sizes so far.

JAC I'll see if I have any nixie's somewhere and CPUShack I'll look around for anything like those numbers as I go. Nothing was in the my sorted drawers, but those might be filed differently.

Ok got them. Sorry about the sizing and sorry about a couple of chips upside down when I scanned

[magictom]

Hi Terry:

What many of us do for hi-res images is to post them on a free external website (e.g. imageshack or picasa) and then link to them. I hope this helps.

[Terry]

Ya Magictom. I have options for servers to host them on if need be. But I think my real problem is learning how to properly scale them first LOL. I'll try and fix those tomorrow. Sorry about that.

[magictom]

Yes, it seems you over-compressed them .. they are now down to less than 20KB LOL

Some of these look very nice, but I can't read all of the labels. Give it another try tomorrow.

BTW, I like those white ceramic RCA chips, they look "cute" LOL

[Neon_WA]

Glad to see you here

With years of hording you will certainly have things you have forgotten that you had.

personally i like the military AMD 8031 & the old logo Toshiba 8035

cheers Stu

[CPUShack]

yup, you are certainly on thew right track

and if you run into probs sizing pics etc, you can always email me, or PM me for my phone #