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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

He only used the scope to look for activity on the pins; he did not really rely on any of its "modern" features. His mod was well within the capabilities of the home hobbyist at the time. Swapping DRAM chips around was a well trodden path.

I think it's probably more important to note that a 4MB SIMM would have run close to $200 at the time this was all current hardware.

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Perhaps there were other ways to see whether there was activity on the bus, but I was thinking of having a scope that was useful for the 8 MHz bus speed. Yes, they existed. On the other hand, they were not affordable for most people.

And yes, memory was expensive back then. I remember spending several hundred dollars to get 16 MB in 1992. That purchasing decision biases my computer purchases to this day. I still over provision RAM after reaping the benefits of it over 30 years ago.

Back in those days you'd check for activity using a logic probe, cheap and simple.

People don't use those much any more because we're spoilt with our cheap scopes

There are a number of ways to probe a data bus for the presence of a signal. You don't need a scope capable of fully characterizing it to know it's there.

And furthermore it wasn't difficult or expensive to get ahold of a 10 year old scope in the 90's; it just took slightly more effort.

Or almost $500 today

The tolerances of the various components was larger back then, allowing weird things like this to work without expensive precision tools.

High tolerances also allowed things like "hot plugging expansion cards" to get past various limitations.

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