Need recommendation for EPROM eraser

[Garth Wilson]

(09-07-2023 07:18 PM)Jeff_Birt Wrote:  

(09-07-2023 07:05 PM)KeithB Wrote:  Garth Wilson would leave them out in the sun. I don't know if that worked though.

You might be able to get a pond sterilizer from your local garden supply.

It does work in bright sunlight and can take 1-10 days depending on which type of EPROM.

Yeah, that was for my first effort, almost 40 years ago, and it did take something like a week.  My first EPROM programmer was hand-made, totally manual, where you set the address and data with DIP switches and then push a button which triggered a 50ms programming pulse.  It was terribly prone to human error, but this was for my first home-made computer and I didn't have a computer of any kind to control any kind of programmer yet.  I found out later that the DIP switches weren't made to last nearly enough cycles for the job anyway.  But then KeithB, somewhat ahead of me in this stuff and always gracious, helped me out with a programmer he built that was controlled by his HP-71.  I took the papers with my hand-assembled code to his house and we entered and edited 256 bytes at a time on the HP-71 before programming that much on the EPROM.  That first home-made computer worked on first try; but it wasn't really useful.  It was interesting times, with anticipation of what our future in this still very immature field would hold.  A year later, I had a nice assembler, programmer, and UV eraser at work.  I still have a couple of Datarase II EPROM erasers, but it has been a few years since I've used one, and the last time before that was probably ten more years.