40 yearold computers still in use 90

Alexandre Peshansky anyway

I believe there was substantially more to that story than pure folklore. Certainly it provided some inspiration for subsequent reverse engineering of silicon. ;)

Reverse engineering silicon always has been done and always will be done. That said I figure it'll be pretty rare that it's used to clone chips outright. A PPOE ripped the lid off a compebreastors part once and found that they had ripped the lid off one of their parts and copied it almost verbatim. Apparently it was a bit of a challenge to reverse engineer because it was so poorly fabbed.

AFAIK people have been ripping the lids off silicon since the very first ICs...

I've started doing some analogue design and embedded stuff to go with it of late (great fun it is too, clearly something I should have had a crack at much earlier in life). To cut a long story short I was looking for some opinions about various transistors I was thinking about using and I came across a site that listed incidents of *fake* transistors... Fascinating. Amazing too, because some of the fakes *paralleled* up discrete bipolar transistors within the same package which is a *huge* no-no...

Even I know that and I'm a newbie to the game. :)

Mucking about with discrete components is great fun, thoroughly recommended, as long as you don't have to pay for the 'scope...

Cheers, Rupert