News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot by VLM on Monday July 03, 2017 @08:46AM (#14687832)
Personal experience having purchased random TO-3 packaged transistors from ebay labeled as LM323K voltage regulators to repair old hardware. Its "well known" in the retrocomputing hobby.

Ironically SOME sellers on ebay are legit, and some sellers are legit sometimes, so if you play a statistical game buying from ten sellers at a 50th the price of legit on-shore sellers, you still save money. Obviously its a lot simpler to build a temporary test fixture for a 70s linear voltage regulator than a memory chip or obscure CPU support chip, LOL.

Re:Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot by sitkack on Monday July 03, 2017 @04:31PM (#14691156)
Idea, adding sub-circuity to a design to detect for bad parts or test for a good part. Would only work for high end designs.