Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Alas, life surely gets in the way when you’re running a free “blogazine” in your spare time. Some ambitious articles are in the works, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I’ve been meaning to share this with VC&G readers for months: it’s my somewhat underwhelming microprocessor and PC BIOS collection. Why underwhelming? Because it’s composed mostly of easy to find x86-compatible processors so far. I am almost more proud of the case than its contents at the moment (cases like the one pictured can be had cheaply at places like Target or craft stores for around $12-$15 US). I could add some more interesting CPUs if I was willing to rip the brains out of my old computers (which, in general, I’m not). But I do have something like six nasty C-64s sitting around, so I should at least add a 6510 to my collection. My favorite part is the 64-pin Motorola 68000 chip that I painstakingly de-soldered from a surplus Mac Plus motherboard some years ago. I’ve always wanted one of those loose because of their unique package size (not among 68000s, but among DIPs in general).

So far in my collection I have the following (from left to right, top to bottom): Intel A80486SX-25, Intel A80486DX-33, Intel A80386DX-25 (x2), Intel P8080A, Intel D80287-10 (co-processor), IIT 3C87-40 (386 clone, I think), Intel R80286-10, Intel CG80286-8, Intel A80387DX-25 (co-prossesor), Motorola MC68000P8. Then I have a bunch of different PC BIOS chips that aren’t all that amazing — the only notable ones are the Phoenix 3.10 chips, and the Mac Plus ROMs (which obviously aren’t BIOSes, but I don’t know where else to put them).

If anybody wants to donate some CPUs to the VC&G Microprocessor collection, let me know. 🙂 Also, if you have a collection yourself, feel free to show us some pictures or discuss it in the comments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under Collecting, Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.