Qty 20 vintage memory chips MM2102-1N swtpc etc...

What is for sale: Qty 20 vintage memory chips MM2102-1N swtpc etc...

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This is a listing for 20 National Semiconductor MM2101-1N Vintage Memory chips. This type of chip was used in SWTPC (Southwest Technical Products Corporation) and other early Microcomputers.
The Suffix-1N is unfamiliar to me. The N denotes the plastic dip package and is a standard with National but the 1 must indicate the access time. Typically that would be 100nS but I don't remember these type chips ever being that fast. I could be confused though. It has been a long time! And these were made in late 76 so there may have been some improvements over the original 450nS and 250 nS.
Static ram made life easier because of unneeded amount of support stuff that dynamic RAM needed. These chips are arranged 1K by 1(Yes you youngsters out there! 1K!! Not Meg or Gig. And that is by 1 bit. Not 64 or 32 etc...) These could populate 1/2 of a 4K by 8 bit memory board. These would be a nice collectible to show people just how far computers have come in those 30+ years. Or you could stuff a board with them or keep them as spares. They did die from time to time.
It would be a shame for the people like my Brother and thousands of other "Hobbiests" and all the companies like SWTPC and OSI and IMSAI to be lost in the rush to get the latest greatest boxes sold at your nearby electronics retailers!!It was the early people that made it possible for you to be reading this listing. It is a computer monitor you are staring at after all!! I remember typing in hex code in order to load a program. Then if you were lucky the cassette interface would work well enough to store and save it for later use at a blazing 300 baud! Floppies and Fixed discs were only a dream on peoples wish list for a long time. The current computer users have it made and still complain!
If you do some research on the net for beginnings of the home computer you will find that SWTPC was selling software dirt cheap as were many others. A notable exception would be Mr. Gates. If the cheap stuff hadn't been out there the computer would have never become popular because it wouldn't have been much fun if you can't make the thing do anything without spending as much for the software as the hardware cost! In the early days computer clubs met and traded software and shared ideas. That didn't sit well with Mr. Gates. For some reason his time was worth more than Bob Uiterwyk(Spelling might be wrong) and the likes of him. His 12 K basic was $12 and the 8K was $8 and the 4K was $4. At those prices you could actually use the computer and learn a higher level language at the same time.
These chips were pricey in their day. You can get these for less than they were sold back in 1976.
These are not terribly plentiful so here is a chance to grab some.