This week's find

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Fri May 10 09:01:28 2002

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Loboyko Steve wrote:

> Congrats. Are they ceramic or ceramic/gold?

They are late generation purple/gray ceramic with tin plated leads. Four
of them were made in Barbados in '83, two the 19th week, one the 29th
week, and one the 30th week. The other two were made in the Philippines
the 28th week of 1978.

I kinda wish they were the earlier white ceramic/gold variety, but these
are better than no cpus at all :)

> I think the 8008 is a pretty interesting CPU. Yeah, it was slow, and
> the instructions weren't very powerful, but I have to beleive that its
> the "dumbest" micro anyone ever wrote a high level language for
> (SCELBAL, which I've got running). I've built a few 8008 computers and
> am working on a "big" 8008 with a front panel and SCELBAL in ROM.
> Don't know what you paid for them but either the economy is getting
> better or the 8008 supply is getting low - perfect NOS 8008's could be
> had for $20 last year and I saw a beat up one go for 70+ recently on
> eBay. Out of my range!

These appear to be in perfect shape, although strangely enough, both of
the 8319 and the 8329 dated chips have a spot of yellow paint on them. I'm
not exactly sure why. I'd guess it was probably put on them when they were
tested at the factory.

The i8008 supply does seem to be a little low, but not nearly as low as
the i4004 or the 1101. I've seen 8008s as low as $0.50 as of a few years
ago (and I passed up on them, sigh), and I paid a good deal more than that
for these. I'd expect the prices on uncommon chips like the i8008 to begin
to fall back to more sane levels as more and more "chip collectors" get
tired of putting large sums of cash into something they can't really get
any use from. They certainly can't pay their rent or buy food with their
"chip collection"...

I'm not going to post to the list what I paid for this particular batch of
i8008s though, since the price was still quite low, and I don't want to
make anyone feel bad...If someone here *really* wants to know, email me
directly. I'm guessing that the place I bought them from hadn't changed
their prices on these kinds of chips since the late 80s or early 90s.

If more chips don't turn up, and the prices don't come down on their own,
it might eventually be worthwhile to have chips like these reproduced.
There are a number of companies out there now that specialize in that kind
of work. Based on prices I've seen in the past, I'd guess that the 8008
could be produced for less than $0.50 in batches of 10k at a time, but
funding a project like that is way out of my current budget. The real
issue that I can see would be getting permission and possibly a mask from
Intel. Maybe Intel would be willing to license such older chip designs
under a hobbyist license? :)

-Toth
Received on Fri May 10 2002 - 09:01:28 BST