A quarter century !

 Recently an email was received concerning the Island Memory kit.

http://wb9kzy.com/imem.htm

  This is a discontinued kit that provided programmable memories for keyers (like the Accu-keyer) that didn't have memory. 

The correspondent was looking for documentation for the kit.  He had acquired a circuit board and nothing else:

built but unused for over 20 years ?

The label on the microcontroller chip has a purpose.  I had purchased a quantity of the Motorola 68HC705j1a chips at a low price.  The only problem was that all the marking on the chips had been ground off.  I don't know why they did this - this used to be done by some ham radio accessory vendors, they'd grind off the part number or paint over them (blacktop) to hide the circuit from hams who might want to duplicate it :)  But in this case the label is there to obscure not the part number but the fact that the top was ground down.

BTW, grinding or sanding the top of an IC is a BAD idea as far as possible static damage but I didn't run into any problems with these particular chips.

Getting back to the recent email, I realized that there was no link to the Island Memory web page, the page itself was there but without a link from another page like wb9kzy.com/ham.htm it didn't exist to the search engines.  So I put a link on http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm in the discontinued kit section at the bottom of the page.  

This is either a testament to the fact that the Island Memory kit worked so well that no doc was needed or there just wasn't enough interest to contact me about the lack of documentation.  Also, at that time I did include printed docs with kits. 

Anyway, it was fun to take a 25 year trip back in time - I wonder what I did with the Island Memory prototype ?  

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm