Apple 1 insanity continues

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012, Al Kossow wrote: I'm not so sure... With those sockets, you have gold contacts against tin plated IC leads. This can cause all sorts of problems where the gold isn't hard enough to break through the tin oxide. New tin oxide will also begin to transfer to the surface of the gold contacts. We saw this a lot back with 30-pin and 72-pin SIMMs when people would put modules with gold-plated contacts in sockets with tin contacts. Then there are those carbon comp resistors... We have no way of knowing the vintage and storage history of those resistors. Carbon comp resistors in general really, really don't like humidity and will drift in value over time as humidity begins to affect the carbon. This is why modern metal film resistors are much more reliable then carbon comps in general purpose applications. Hopefully he happened to use old stock AB resistors since their carbon comp resistors were somewhat better sealed and tended to age /much/ better.