On Sat, 6 Feb 2016 15:20:21 -0600, philo wrote:

On 02/06/2016 03:08 PM, wrote:
On




Back in my experimenting days maybe ten years ago, I was given an ISA
memory expansion card.

Just to see if I could do it, I bumped the RAM up on a 286 I had to 16
megs, the maximum a 286 can address. At the time the 286 was built, even
if one could have put in 16 megs of RAM it would have been unaffordable.
I remeber the memory chips being over $8 each for 1mbX8 chips!!




There were no RAM slots, it was all on-board discrete chips. the machine
came with 512k


I know - the chips are what I was talking about. 1MB X 8 were the
little ones. Mabee they were 1X8. I think they went up to 8X8 about
the time of the chip shortage caused by a fire in a resin factory
somewhere in Thaikand or something like that. The pdips were plastis -
the most common - and cerdips were ceramic and less common - and more
expensive.
They were pdips or cerdips, and if they were not in screw-machine
sockets they tended to walk themselves out with thermal cycling. We
used a very expensive product called Stabilant 22 - it is currently
about $55 for 30ml of the stuff - on the sockets to keep the contacts
from going bad. With the stabilant on the sockets we didn't have to
reseat the chips so often (memory, processors, roms, and even
interface cards.

The expansion card I put in used those 30 pin SIMMs

Most of the memory cards we used used even numbered pin DIPP chips
(no chip dip jokes, ok?) and there were even simm module boards with
sockets to insert DIPP ram in.