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.
