Gregory's Serverthis 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.
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 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.
[DATA EXPUNGED]
@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 @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. @tubetime Sounds like you might need PartsBox 😀 (yes, I might be biased). @tubetime  @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 Bid for types or type count / 3 or ... ?  @tubetime @Cdespinosa is there anyplace left? WeirdStuff, Halted/HSC, Excess Solutions, Disk Drive Depot, Fry’s??? |
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.