6875's? Nice score on those! Let me know when they're available. I've never actually had to replace one, but being one of the handful of guys that actually take in system 3-4 WMS for repair, the day will come. Now if only you could find a stash of 55516's.

I'm on the hedge on some future projects regarding if they will be SMT or not. I know that the pin crowd highly prefers thru-hole stuff, and I am fighting to find acceptable parts to make it possible. Same with trying to avoid using PLCC's and FPGA. Again, doing my best to cater to the customer requests, but man it's getting hard to do.

-Hans

I keep thinking to myself that an entrepreneur should be able to find a way to bring some of these things back into production, we are talking 1970's-1980's technology level here. There's GOT to be companies willing to do small runs of chips for private entities (small as in 10,000 pieces or so). Or there should be surplus equipment available to re-establish a line on a smaller scale. I can understand why bigger companies aren't interested for sure, but there has got to be enough demand for a 'boutique' type organization to succeed.

-Hans

Good to know about Central, I'll make sure to put them on my 'go scratch' list for new designs.

-Hans

Not surprising to hear this. I'd guess that less than 1% of the designs we're assembling at my full-time job are using DIP components of any type, and most of those are for things like opto-isolators and such. We'll go a month or two sometimes between work orders that actually use our DIP insertion machine these days, mainly for a few legacy boards that are only still being made to support existing systems.

-Hans

Man, if only I could do the development work on something like that, I'd start pushing some serious hardware.

-Hans