Date   : Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:12:49
From   : Tim Fardell <tim.fardell@...>
Subject: Re: [OT] Would anyone happen to have a 4116 dram chip

chris whytehead wrote:
> He later told he he had found that all the chips were faulty, but only in
> the top 4K(?) where they were masked by the ROM. So Sinclair was buying
> faulty chips to keep the price down.
>
> Or is that another urban myth?

The upper 32K of RAM in the Speccy is actually made up of eight 4164
chips, but with one of the address lines tied to ground, effectively
halving their capacity. It might well be that Sinclair used RAM chips
with faults in the unused "half" - who knows?