No, those are DIPs

Post #4,233 by tonytib 8/8/01 2:16:21 PM Reply	No, those are DIPs which is an appropriate name for them. I've never heard it called alligator memory. And although I probably don't have your wealth of experience, I've had fun stuffing DIP's of various sorts into sockets. It's also fun when you put in one backwards. Tony
Post #4,240 by Andrew Grygus 8/8/01 2:45:42 PM Reply	That is most fun on an Apple II You get smoke and exploding chips, and a game of "find the dead ICs". And no, I never heard of alligator memory either, but I presume he had to mean DIPs, 'cause that's how memory came. Another Apple II fun was to pull a card with the power on (no fan, so it was easy to do). Pull it a little tilted and it blew every board on the bus plus a few ICs on the main board. I used to know exactly which ones had to be replaced. Since Apple IIs used the video retrace to refresh RAM, a problem almost anywhere on the main board could cause memory problems. The Apple II design was pure hacker. If something could be done with obscure cleverness to make it cheaper, that's the way it was done, right down to a software disk controller. Even choice of the 6502 processor was based purely on price - the Intel chips were newer and way faster, so they cost more, so they were unnaceptable to Apple. They charged a whole lot of money for this pile of crap, and worked hard to build a "mystique" to support the price. Even so, it was VisiCalc, not Apple, that made the Apple II a success (Bricklin wouldn't do a CP/M version because he couldn't copy protect it effectively on such an open platform). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #4,251 by Ashton 8/8/01 3:38:44 PM Reply	Twas the Wozniak mindset.. in replication. Cute/dumb overall
Post #4,302 by static 8/8/01 8:24:31 PM Reply	After watching this discussion... ... the name does come back to me. And I remembered why I didn't use it, too. I had spent time dabbling in electronics - ICs were DIL* for a long time before the surface mount revolution quite caught on. But if you hadn't dabbled like I had, you wouldn't have seen what DIL chips looked like before they were inserted. Whoever coined the term "alligator memory" obviously hadn't! Fortunately on the old IBM PC motherboard, if you put on in backwards, it simply didn't work. Turn it around, and it was fine. If you also missed a pin, or missed one side, the same thing: fix it and it worked like a bought one. Wade. *DIL = dual in-line, sometimes dual in-line legs. The other term, DIP, was for dual in-line pins and meant the same thing. Two rows of pins down the long sides of a black rectangle of plastic or ceramic. They went through the circuit board (unless you used a socket) and were generally wide enough apart to be able to solder individually. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #4,331 by Steve Lowe 8/9/01 1:27:46 AM Reply	Spent a summer in high school soldering components on boards Working for my Dad, who ran a Printed Circuit Board shop. One of his customers was making full-length 8-bit 512K RAM boards. My job was to insert components (caps, resistors, and sockets for the RAM chips and supporting logic IC's), trim the leads, solder into place and test. This was early 80's when wave solder and solder masking technologies were rapidly advancing, leading to the surface mount processes we see today. They were also among the first shops to produce multilayer boards in the area. Unfortuantely, due to the high costs of compliance with EPA regulations and disposal of the waste (primarily potassium cyanide IIRC) from the etching and plating processes, they decided to cease that portion of their business. I'd would have loved to seen firsthand how those technologies developed. ----- Steve

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