Valuable museum stocks?

Question

Needing a bistable to operate on a supply voltage from

3 to 8 volts (depending upon the state of discharge of the battery in my R/C model), and not having any suitable CMOS to hand, I fashioned one in the DTL style from the junk box.

Which led me to muse ... when the bulk of electronics mass-production has moved to miniature surface mount components, will the junk boxes held by enthusiastic amateurs, with their myriad of wire-ended components prove to be the gold mine that funds their retirement pensions?

(I've probably got 5000 NPN small-signal BJTs that I'll never get around to using!)

Don Stauffer · Accepted Answer

Probably not. There was so much of that stuff around that it is considered junk, and very few museums value it much. Not that I am happy at that situation. I hope at least a few specialty (electronics) museums pick up a fair amount of representative junk. I cry sometimes when I hear of old computers that were trashed.

Speaking of which, I was doing my own collecting for a desktop home collection of old computer stuff. I had a small board of core memory. I was cleaning it up one day when the soldering iron and its holder fell off an upper shelf and landed SQUARE on the core area, really trashing it. Anyone have a board with some core memory on it they don't want?

Valuable museum stocks?

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