Well the latgest question I have is whether early NEC chips with any lida were commonly used to populate tne 5162. And if your lids aren't gold plated, is the lid aluminum or some related alloy?

Speaking of gold-plated chips, I'm finally scrapping the last remnants of a Redactron mag card word processor; the main board has some house numbered white ceramic chips with the usual gold pins and lids (24, 40, 16 pins). Any interest for decoration/jewelry/exploration/whatever? Also some Burroughs boards with their odd square package. Finally, some Burroughs memory boards containing what I think are 2102s, but I'd have to investigate. m On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 1:43 PM John Herron via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

What is the Burroughs part number / printed on the chip? The 1449 1112 RAM chips are Burroughs' part number for the intel 2102 RAM Bill On Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 3:51 PM Brent Hilpert via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

On 1/21/23 10:14, Chris via cctalk wrote: I'm just guessing, but probably NP copper.

On Sat, 21 Jan 2023, Chris via cctalk wrote: Some eaarly 5150's had a black power supply, sometimes with a white switch. My first 5150 (directly from IBM) had a black supply. But, that was a 65W power supply, and for a 5160, especially if you put in a hard disk, you want the 135W supply. The stock (made by Xebec) 5160 hard drive controller supported two drives of 5MB, 10MB (default), 16MB, and 26MB drives with unmarked jumper pad. Any of those full height hard drives would be more than appropriate power draw for the 65W power supply.

And 1 of the floppies (it may habe 3) was full height. So maybe someone was trying to pawn it off as a real xt, piling everything they could into the box to make it convincing as possible.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:56 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: Price is not a very good indicator for gold, especially nowadays as it's so heavily manipulated/controlled by the banksters. Looking at this chart showing historical gold production going back to 1960, one can observe that gold supplies decreased sharply during the 1970s, and continued to drop into the 1980s. This seems to coincide with when memory prices were increasing dramatically (as a result of production shortages). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_gold#/media/File:Top_5_Gold_Producers.png At the same time, observe that by the mid- to late-1980s gold production in the USA, Australia, and China began ramped up sharply. I believe that also coincides with memory prices coming back down. Whether that correlation is THE reason or the ONLY reason, I can't say without further inquiry, but on the face of it, the supply of gold seems to have been a contributing factor to the price of RAM skyrocketing. Regardless, whether or not gold is "cheap" is not really the issue in my opinion. Gold is an expensive material to use relative to most others that go into making a computer no matter what it costs, and no (sensible) company is going to use more than it really needs. Thinly-plated gold on one RAM chip is not that much, but multiply that by a million and now we're talking a treasure chest. The first Pentium processor contained about half a gram of gold in it, which is considerable. There are 31.1g in a troy ounce, and a troy ounce of gold is currently shooting back towards $2,000 (and likely well beyond at this point). If you can get your hands on 16 original Pentium processors, you've got yourself some nice vacation money (ignoring extraction and refining costs). Compare that to processors today, which have virtually no gold in the CPU, and only a thin plating on the pins. And then there's a company several years ago that created a silver alloy that does not tarnish, obviating the need for gold plating except for in the most critical electronics applications. There's (usually) a good reason companies manufacture their products the way they do, and it's not to make them look blingy (well, some do). If it's not absolutely required, they're not going to use it. As soon as it was feasible to do away with using gold, it was phased out. Sellam