SILICON HEAVEN Yes Red Dwarf fans that was a deliberate reference, though this post is actually just about more of my obsessive electronics geeky stuff. I think I've mentioned that one of my various collections, and the only one that I still allow myself to add to by buying stuff off the internet, is radiation detectors (including Geiger counters). They rarely turn up in Australia, and overseas postage almost always puts foreign listings out of my ~$50 maximum price range, so there's a good limit on my capacity to aquire them that keeps it interesting without causing me to waste too much money and space on them. As I'm facinated by electronics, nuclear technology, and cold war history, they're pretty perfect for me in other respects as well. I probably average buying around one/year, though they're one of these things where a year will go buy never seeing any new listings and then there are a couple of cheap ones in the one month. The cool looking ones listed with "Geiger" in the title often go for a lot, but I pick out the 'boring' dosimeter types and ones that have poor descriptions such that nobody else finds them. As part of searching for those poorly described listings, I find myself disregarding lots of RF/electromagnetic radiation detectors which Ebay throws into the same category (at that rate they could throw in light meters and IR temperature guns as well, but it's their line to draw). A little while ago I discovered amongst these results a new listing appeared titled non-descriptively as "Arlunya gauss maus". Though a perfect example of the sort of listing that few people would discover, the one identifiable part of the name was "gauss" which suggested another electromagnetic detector. Still it looked interesting, and new listings that pass through all my filters are are rare enough that I'll look at anything, so I followed through. The meter itself looked unusual - roughly '80/90s vintage with an LCD display on one part and a curly cable connecting to a separate rectangular block. More interesting though was a plastic tub behind it in the photos which clearly contained at least a few ICs pressed into styrofoam. For my electronics hobby I'm always looking for good selections of old logic chips to use in projects, but obscure chips are also one of my repressed collecting obsessions and I couldn't help but notice some early-looking ceramic chips with gold plated-metal cans on top. Maybe early CPU chips? The photos were all just a little too blurry to make out any part numbers, and the one-line description just waved them off as "a small container of parts". Starting bid was $50, and it was $13 postage from New South Wales (NSW), so a bit high for my liking. There looked to be more than one layer of silicon-layden plystyrene in the tub though, so if I assumed around a hundred chips, and if it worked then maybe I'd buy a gauss meter at a hamfest for ~$15 just in case it came in handy, ~$0.50 per chip seemed vaguely reasonable. On the other hand the risk of buying a tub filled with 100 of the same chip with a part number which is completely unknown to the internet, and therefore completely useless, was quite real. In other words a good old-fashioned Ebay gamble. I bid, and predictably nobody else did, so I had it for $63 including post. A week later it arrived in the letter box (which out here doubles as a parcel box, regardless of signature requirements). Well bubble-wrapped, the "Arlunya gauss maus" was the first thing to be extracated and actually even still had a working 9v battery in it. "Maus" looks German, but it turned out to be made in Australia, which explains why the name "Arlunya" turns up people selling T-shirts by aboriginal artists, presumably it's some aboriginal word from somewhere in Aus, though the company itself seems unknown to the internets*, which is also pretty typical for Australian companies of that era (maybe I'll discover them advertising in one of my old electronics magazines one day). The device seems designed for measuring AC electromagnets, with the (heavy) block wired to the meter being a big indiuctive sensor (kind-of looking like a mouse/rat with a tail, so perhaps there's a joke in calling it a "Gauss maus"). It probably cost someone a huge sum once. Waving some permanent magnets around showed some Gauss readings, but as it only reacts to a changing field it's only really useful for electromagnets. Still, maybe it'll be just what I want one day if I try to build/fix something with a lot of powerful solenoids. Serial number is quite low, "GM0286", also a good omen for the tub of chips if I'm looking for CPUs. So onto the tub, which turned out to be marked "HTV Electron Tube", though everything inside was solidly solid-state. Australia Post had shaken many of the chips out of the styrofoam so it was a bit of a mess inside, but clearly there was plenty of variety and many useful 7400 series logic chips. The biggest of the ceramic/gold chips were four labelled sequentially MF51158R through to MF51161R, which didn't suggest anything particularly exciting. They all seemed to be early-mid 70s vintage though, so hope persisted. After a bit more styro-shuffling I noticed a smaller purple-ceramic/gold-can one with an Intel logo on it... "C8008-1". A quick run to the computer to check and YES! I've found myself a glitzy example of Intel's first 8bit microprocessor, and distant ancestor of the x86 instruction set (their first microprocessor, the 4bit 4004, apparantly used a distinctly different instruction set). It looks pretty much like the pic on the Wikipedia page in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KL_Intel_C8008-1.jpg One pin has unfortunately corroded away, obviously there was some moisture around where this box was kept and it has affected a few of the chips, but most survived alright. A wire could still be soldered on easily enough if one wanted to build something with it, but apparantly quite a few support chips are required to make a computer out of it. For now I like it enough just as a bit of history. It's the "-1" variant which raced at the not-so-heady clock speed of 800KHz (yes KHz) with capacity for 36,000 to 80,000 instructions per second. It makes this mid-90s Pentium CPU that I'm using now sound like alien tech at 120MHz and over 100 million instructions per second. Small though (support chips aside), and it didn't need a cooling fan. A familiar logo appeared at the page for the i8008 at CPU-World ( https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/8008/ ), one of the second-source manufacturers for the chip was Microsystems International, a short lived semiconductor company that never turned a profit but between 1973 and 1974 made those four MF511xxR chips that I was originally entranced by. Unfortunately there seems to be absolutely zero info online for these. The sequential numbering and ceramic/metal-can package suggests custom ROM chips, but then you wouldn't expect almost a 1-year gap between the manufacturing date of the first one and the others (also the first one is thinner and the model/logo print is rougher). One remaining glitzy white-ceramic/metal-can chip is a MK4102P, which with some detective work translated to a 1024x1 SRAM chip, 350ns. That's a RAM chip with a one-bit wide data bus - 128 bytes for an 8bit CPU. It's also made in 1973, and though Intel didn't date-code these 8008s, quite possibly they're all parts for the same early computer/controller system. Wondering whether there might be a whole shed full of more stuff like this, or machines that they are parts for, I sent a polite message to the seller asking if there was any similar stuff they had yet to list. I entertained ideas of driving all the way to NSW to pick up a ute-load of early 70s computers and high-spec test equipment, but after a few days, no response. Anyway, so I won that Ebay lottery, and over the last few evenings I've been looking through all the less-glitzy logic, counting 134 chips overall, all early ones from 1969 - 1976, and to my delight as a collector, including all the different early logic families. Besides the triumphant Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) which is still made (though pretty much obsolete in the face of modern CMOS varieties) and used by me, there's Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL), Diode-Transistor Logic (DTL), and Emitter-Coupled Logic (ECL). Now my earliest chip (with a definitely believeable date code) is a 1969 Motorola MC770 RTL BCD to Decimal Decoder, in a plastic package but sporting some very sexily tapered gold-plated pins and unusual lumps underneath the package, presumably to ensure the correct insertion height above the circuit board. None of the chips look to have been used, though some pins have been bent about (maybe only when the chips came adrift in the post). While RTL and DTL are mainly stepping stones to TTL, ECL logic is interesting as a sort-of alternative path. There were seven ECL chips in the tub, made by Motorola in 1970-1973, four with gold plated pins. This logic family was much faster than any others of the time, a couple of mine are MC1013 85MHz J-K Flip Flops, made around the same time as the 8008 which remember could only run up to 0.8MHz. The trouble was that they used a lot more power, in turn generated much more heat, and circuits using them were more difficult to design. They did find use in very fancy things like the Cray-1 supercomputer though. gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Logic%20family Besides those there were a few op-amps ranging from good old 741s to some wideband op-amps in cans with gold-plated leads. Only two more chips after the MF511xxR ones defied all attempts to track down any description/specs online: a U6A7742393 (probably DTL), and a Raytheon RC7230P (not a clue). So if anyone out there has some old 70s databooks that they want to go hunting through, do let me know if you find out what they are! About a week after that package arrived, I discovered another one in my letter box. I was a bit curious because I wasn't expecting anything. I opened it up to find, to my astonishment, an old radiation detector "Radiation Alert MC 500" by S. E. International USA (still going, and with a manual for a similar model downloadable from their website!). Surely finding one of these on Ebay and buying it isn't something I'd forget, but very few people know that I collect these things (mainly because not many know me at all), least of all in NSW where it came from. The name did look vaguely familiar though, someone I bought one from years ago? Suddenly I thought to dig the pre-paid postage bag for the "Gauss maus" out of the bin and sure enough it was from the same seller! How very nice of them, it's the Ebay auction that keeps on giving! Of course I plugged in a 9v battery and, nothing. Waved it around my various gamma radiation sources (what, you don't keep radioactive materials in your house?), nothing. Wait was that a tick from the speaker, and again, oh wait what's that smell... When the smoke leaked out I realised it wasn't the speaker, but something shorting out inside before the HV generator for the geiger tube went into its own electronic meltdown, stinking out the house with that distinctive "oops" smell. I'll open it up and see whether it's fixable some time, and in the mean time it looks good on the shelf with the others. It even came with an original leather pouch. Later that day I checked my emails and there was one from the seller (via Ebay). Apparantly having only then discovered my message, they told me, while not exactly answering my question, that they'd found something else that "went with it" and sent that as well earlier in the week. It didn't have anything to do with the Gauss meter of course, just like the tub full of old chips, but apparantly everything I love just looks like it should go together for this person. I thanked them graciously of course. I am now obsessed with watching their newly listed items though. A pretty confusing combination of things like footy magazines, a kerosene camp stove (I know all about them), plastic toy soldiers, bulk lots of old watches (none with radiation dosimeters built in, I made sure to check), sunglasses, a sexy poster of Kylie Minogue, Game Boy Advance games, chrome filler caps from cars, etc. Perhaps stuff from a deceased estate mixed in with things from a 'normal' person of about my age? Anyway no sign of any more 70s electronics parts or radiation tech, but it's not like I could really hope for much more anyway. - The Free Thinker. * Actually looking closer that seems to have been used as a brand name by "The Dindima Group Pty Ltd" who do still have a website online. It's untouched since the mid 2000s though, even with a Flash-animated webpage header, oh dear. No mention of the "Gauss Maus", even at the earliest archived version in the Wayback Machine. http://www.dindima.com/