John Devereux wrote:

Hey I remember those, in UK you could get bags (literally) of 7400 and
4000 series stuff, all of them test rejects. Many of them unmarked or
with some house code I think. As a kid I built a succession of "IC
Testers" , fixtures with LEDs and push buttons on each pin. Never
actually *did* much with them, it was more fun testing them. The CMOS
gates were cool, you could make a the outputs go on and off by waving
your hand near them.


Poly-Paks was THE place in the US to buy them. I bent the pins for
any bad section, and used lots of them to either build or repair
equipment that didn't need that section.

Poly-Paks also sold some parts by the pound. It was a good way for a
kid to get an assortment of resistors, caps sockets & such cheap enough
to learn electronics. Do you have any idea how many resistors were in a
five pound box?