Housing collections

[Scott Stevens]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 22:59:46 -0700
Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:

> 
> In article <20051228200901.50bc58e8.chenmel at earthlink.net>,
>     Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>  writes:
> 
> What does everyone think is an acceptable temperature range for
> storage?  In Salt Lake my garage will get below freezing in winter and
> above 110 F in the summer.
> 
> > I am at the point where it's time to post giveaways and
> > real-cheap-sale items on eBay just to get rid of some of the
> > excess, which isn't necessarily museum-grade stuff, but then... I
> 
> Will you give us a chance before ebay? :-)
> 

I post from time to time about giveaways.  I am talking about
things like Apple CDROM drives, etc.  

> > I'm a hardware person, and what I really want to focus more time
> > on is using some of the 'classic' silicon I have accumulated.
> > Z80 sbcs (real Z80, not the new clones and ASIC things) and the
> > Intel 8088 project that I've half completed.
> 
> Pray tell, what is the "Intel 8088 project"?

http://sasteven.multics.org/8088page.html

(it has gone dormant at the moment)

> 
> > All those wonderful
> > 8255, 6821 and Z80 peripheral chips, all the SRAM parts I have,
> > etc.
> 
> I only recently heard about people specializing in collecting
> individual chips rather than whole systems.  It makes perfect sense
> from a collecting perspective now that I've heard of it, but I'd never
> considered the idea myself.  Do you purposefully look for specific
> chips?  Are you satisfied in removing them from shipping systems or do
> you try to find "virgin" chips in their shipping tubes?
> 

I don't 'collect' chips so much as I accumulate them.  I recently
got a whole scad more being thrown away at work.  (Anybody need a
Triac?  I now have 900 of them new in the tubes.)  I do have some
chips that I collect individually, and there's room for such a
hobby to evolve.  Early datecode analog and TTL parts have a lot
of interest to me.  I've always spent a lot of time looking up
and speccing out any IC Part Number I've not encountered before.
But I want to USE them in new projects.  The most recent project
I can look back on was an all-TTL stepper motor controller that I
built some time ago.

> > I'm now in the process of dipping my feet in the GnuEDA
> > package, [...]
> 
> I recall reading in EE times about another freely available tool chain
> that was quite useful for small projects.  I can dig up a reference if
> you'd like.  I don't recall it being specifically named as "gnu"
> anything, so I think its a different toolchain from what you're
> describing.

One of the important parts of any tool like this is a good parts
library.  I now have gschem up and running and it has LOTS of the
things that are important.  My trial run with it is going to be
the schematic for the 8088-based SBC I posted about a few weeks
ago.  I have the printed schematic from the manual for that, but
it's very coarse and I want an editable/revisable version anyway.