Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Added many MARF photos (it's a mind-bogglin' thing) and some good 258 VCO shots for Herr Peake
to:

www.synthtech.com/pix/buchla

A very reliable source told me there are about 30 MARFs in existence, but only 2 are known 100%
functional. My system has 2, chained via ribbon cables as a 4 x 32 sequencer. But there is NO WAY
I'm applying power to 350+ 30yr old CMOS ICs.

I spotted 2 VERY NASTY ICs form this era: SSS was the worse CMOS vendor in history. In order to
take market share from National, RCA and Motorola they took shortcuts in the wafer fabrication.
Too bad it resulted in 30% (yes, 30%) field failure rates. At Data General I recall 10 techs or
so having a "purge SSS off the planet" day, pulling 100s of SSS chips out of parts drawers,
prototypes, you name it and tossing into the crusher.

Also, you young wipper-snappers are blessed with not only IC advances, but ∗capacitors∗ in the
1970s sucked pond water. Ceramic disc caps were like +-80% tolerance and had ESR (effective
series resistance) 20X what a monolithic axial ceramic cap has today. But the largest advancement
has been in 'film' caps, what you make VCOs and VCFs/fixed filters with. In the 1970s, only a few
US companies made them, and they were $$$. They were rolled up like toilet paper, and had this
NASTY habit of de-laminating. One of the MARFs has 2 of these 0.015uf caps unrolled. Time to call
Digikey :)

These 2 modules are the dirtiest and all the slide pots are virtually frozen. Gack.

Paul S.