I CAN NOT believe I am hearing this. I thought we were so proud of ourselves because we can managed to get slightly obsolete, yet first class hardware for pennies on the dollar. I guess I am really wrong on this, and that everyone here does think a Tek 545A is THE SHIT. Anyway, I am tuning out. My tires are getting bald. -- Will

I think it's worth considering if the necessary tools to non-destructively reverse-engineer a modenr machine exist now _at any price_. I think they do not. If you think back 20 years, logic analysers existed. They were beyond the reach of most, if not all, hobbyists, but they existed. Now, of course, many hobbyists have one. Ditto for a 'scope. I think it's very likely that the hobbyists of the future will have fast 'scopes, BGA rework facilities, and the like. But there's more to it than that. Suppose you have a modern PC motherboard with some ASIC in the middle. You will be able to remove and replace it. You will be able to connect it into a test circuit. But I am going to assume that such an ASIC has many bits of hidden 'state'. I also don't believe there will be any more laws of digitial logic discorvered (I think that subject is pretty well understood now), so there'll be no new way of determining said 'state' from the external connections, or of forcing the chip into every possilbe state, or... So, what aew you going to do? Risk uncapping the package and looking at the die? Will you be able to make anything out of it? (speaking from experience I know that a large board of discrete transistors ia about the worst possible thing to have to reverse-engineer, you have no idea what the various sections do, whereas, say, a microprocessor pretty much ties things down. Soing an ASIC would be like the former, only worse). Maybe there'll be CAD tools that will help, I am certainly not holding my breath, since I've yet to see _anything_ available today that can really help. And uncapping the package will certainly risk damaging the IC. Would you want to risk doing that on what is a one-of-a-kind machine? Think of doing the HP01 watch _now_. It's a single ceramic hybrid module inside contiaining 5 or so silicon dice. The watch is rare. It's also reasonably well understood, since it's knwon to a be a 48 bit version of the 56 bit chipset used in HP calculators of the time. But if you had one would you want to ceack open that module to reverse-engineer it? I wouldn't. -tony