On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:19:28 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Incidentally, I just remmembered that I once won an arguement whether a
stick arc welder will erase an EPROM. An Intel 2764 was used because I
had plenty of them. My guess is that it takes about 2 minutes of
exposure to trash the EPROM and about 10 minutes to totally erase it.
Keeping an arc going for 10 minutes was impossible, but 15 seconds at a
time was easy enough. I also managed to get slag on every EPROM, but
that was expected.

Somewhere in the 80s I salvaged a proprietary controller in a steel sheet
cutting machine using this. We were rushing a repair late at night in the
middle of nowhere in France. About three sticks managed to wipe 8 devices.
It needed some convincing the customer though, he believed I was joking.
The nicest part was the French cuisine afterwards ;-)