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