--- On Sun, 2/5/12, jim s <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:
I have a come into an opportunity
which people here might help with.? The opportunity is
a 75 to 100# box of Eproms.?
Any ideas on what to do, what the chances are that
they will
work?
They will work. EPROMs are very hard to damage. Despite all the precautions and warnings,
most of this stuff is quite resilient. I have a box-o-EPROMs like that, scavenged pulls
from a recycler. I think I've come across two or three bad ones out of hundreds. And
there's no telling if they even worked before they were tossed into the pile.
I don't have the means or time to do testing,
though recent discussion suggest there might be some cheap
eprom programmer which might do that.? I have never
blown up a prom from normal handling, w/o antistat but with
the shear number of parts here, the odds are that some are
blown.? I am handling these now with antistat, but the
prior situation is what it is.
Don't bother testing them. I'll bet they work. As a frequent purchaser/user of
scavenged, piled in box EPROMs, I wouldn't worry. If you want to ship small quantities
without them getting bent, just make little stacks, interleaving the legs, invert the one
on the bottom, and tie them together with a rubber band. But, I've even been shipped a
box of ROMs just crammed in there, and they were mostly OK. Yeah, you have to sit there
and straighten legs, and a couple will get trashed, but again, these things are hardy.
Should I sort them by part, list them with a "if
it doesn't
work I'll send you another", sell them as untested pull lots
(I will sort and tube them by type a and PN as my
contribution to this project), or some other way?
If you want, you can sort them out by part number, but I'd just say send them out by
the pound as mixed lots. Much easier that way, and most of us hobbyists use a lot of
different types of ROMs. Maybe just go by "small flat rate box-full" or
something.
-Ian