Well, also keep in mind that people in those days were spending like 20% of their income on rent or a mortgage payment, rather than 80%. Don't forget that when adjusting for inflation. A lot of people also lifted EPROMs from work, recycled them from old projects, etc. Whatever it took to get the job done. In those days I had a friend who worked at a place that had a Data I/O 29A device programmer; he'd let me come in after hours to program EPROMs. -Dave On 9/4/23 13:08, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Very interesting and thank you. I guess 6 eproms were a bit costly (adjusted for inflation) so harvesting was a way to go to reuse them from other sources.
$150 at least puts it in the hands of hobbyists though a PC before 1985 was still quite expensive.. ok so you'd probably come across these people at enthusiast gatherings or that sort of thing. Or a well off friend.
Thanks. Just curious. And yes I meant Eprom - thanks there too.
On Mon, Sep 4, 2023, 12:26 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On 9/4/23 12:17, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
How common and costly were EEPROM burners in the early 1980s?
I’m watching Adrain’s Digital Basement where he covers the Apple II clones. Was it pretty cheap to buy large enough blank EEPROMs and then copy them yourself or were the burners expensive back then? I assume you mean EPROMs. EEPROMs are not the same thing.
Back then, cheapies that plug into an ISA bus slot and run under MS-DOS could be had for $150 or so, while professional instruments cost thousands even well up into tens of thousands of dollars.
The disadvantages of each of those classes of tools were the same back then as they are now: The cheapies can fry chips, and stop working with the next release of DOS or (nowadays) Windows, while the professional instruments cost as much as a car...but they always work and don't depend on a PC OS.
Blank EPROMs cost anywhere from $10 to $50 back then, depending on capacity, but astute folks could (and often did) spot them on random boards being sold cheap at hamfests, harvest the chips, and erase them.
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA