| ??? 09/05/06 23:41 Read: times |
#123716 - This was in the '70's, before many restrictions Responding to: ???'s previous message |
I do recall that the owner of one popular "hobby" (surplus/floor-sweepings) house was jailed for stenciling JAN-labels onto parts that hadn't earned them, so SOME restrictions were in place, but the guy was out of jail before I learned of it.
One of my colleagues was asking about development of a device, for one of his European clients, not unlike a PLD programmer with which he could verify that LSI's he received as "surplus" for resale were suitable were, in fact, what they claimed to be. It's far too easy to relabel a package. Sometimes one "grade" of a part is more popular than another. In the '80's, it was not unheard-of that memory IC's had been relabeled to a "higher" speed-grade, making them "proper" for IBM PC's. Some people did jail time for that, too, but not because the parts were relabeled, but because they had been stolen. The lot numbers had not been changed. <sigh> Even high-tech crooks are dumb, I guess. RE |
