Gregory's Server(before being split, this means there were over 216,000 parts that we had to sort through manually!)
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60 comments
 HSC was on Ryder street for many, many years, but they had to move in ~2016. the building was demolished in May 2017. HSC/Halted has had several other locations over the years, but served as a steady source of parts for hobbyists and engineers. many famous individuals bought things here. this was great for a while, but on July 16, 2022, Excess Solutions opened their doors to the public for the last time. and on that day, I decided to get myself a guaranteed supply of chips, and two of my friends were totally down for it. we ended moving 80 cabinets -- containing 4,000 plastic drawers, to an undisclosed location where we could slowly pick through the collection, catalog it, and separate it out three ways. after separating out my share of the parts, i stuffed them into thousands of plastic ESD-safe bags, each labeled with a sharpie and stored in a moving box. over the last few months, i spent hours and hours carefully packing chips into separate drawers. by putting multiple part numbers into a single drawer, i was able to reduce it down to just 12 cabinets. if you've been wondering why i haven't been posting as prolifically this year, this is the major reason. OK some answers to questions you might have: * i don't want to run an electronics business so i'm not planning to sell any. doesn't mean i won't give parts to friends occasionally. * yes, i have a catalog of parts organized in a spreadsheet, which makes it much easier to find things * yes, many of the drawers (for MOS parts) have ESD protection in the form of an aluminum foil layer. i applied it with glue and this custom 3D-printed jig. HSC originally used black ESD foam which degraded horribly over the years. i hate that stuff. i hate the sour smell it gets when it degrades, and i hated having to pick hundreds of chips out of crumbling, decaying foam. * rarest part i found? probably these 4004 processor chips. but there were other oddities in the collection, shift register memories, drivers, and that sort of thing.
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@carpetbomberz yeah they're neat but were state of the art for only a short time so nobody remembers them @tubetime I bet there’s a bunch of nerds losing their shit over this right now.  @tubetime This is amazing. I had been hoping someone that would take care of them got all the good stuff :)  @tubetime Could I apply for some 1 bit SRAM with separate Din and Dout lines? @tubetime I dont know, I always wanted to make a digital delay out of one, could never find one of the static ram chips with separate IO lines. funny story, i loaned some parts in the 4000 series (support chips) to a friend of mine who ended up building a SUPER COOL PROJECT with them. like -- mind blowingly cool. keep an eye out for 4004-related news.  @tubetime I know you didn't ask, but I am not crazy about aluminum foil for ESD protection. You don't want high conductivity, you want low (but non-zero) conductivity. That's what the black foam was doing, before it died of old age.  @tubetime did you find any chips damaged by that foam? I've heard it's slightly acidic so it can damage them over the long term  @tubetime @tubetime happy they didn’t just get trashed. To me HSC and the like were the last vestiges of the Silicon Valley that I remember. Where else could I go over lunch with a friend and have random guessing discussions about what this or that machine does? @RebelbotJen yes! the guy was going to toss all the parts and sell the cabinets. @tubetime I really want to know what you have - I don't have a good reason for it, just curious.  @jamespthomas oddly, no. most of the fun obvious stuff was already picked by the time i got it. @tubetime I hope you've got a few projects lined up for all these chips.  @tubetime @Cdespinosa is there anyplace left? WeirdStuff, Halted/HSC, Excess Solutions, Disk Drive Depot, Fry’s???  |
these parts started out at HSC Electronics (aka Halted) in Santa Clara and were collected over a period of 40 years.