Skip to the end if wordiness bores you.I just thought I would share my adventure in purchasing memory for my daughter's TR-76 in the hopes that someone else could get a similar deal in their own town.
I checked the usual sources online for the memory SIMMs to expand her keyboard but I was more interested in local purchase because of the immediate gratification. I checked the "normal" local B&M stores, but of course noone carried this older type of memory.
I decided to check the local mom and pop computer stores to see if they had any old SIMMs just laying around that they might part with cheaply. The first store I tried had a whole shoebox filled with various 72 pin SIMMs with paper tags showing the capacity stuck to each one. I dug through them and found only two 32 MEG sticks that had a "-60" on the chip labels indicating 60ns speed. Unfortunately these sticks were really tall, over 1.5" and I didn't think they would fit in the TR. I left empty handed.
Last Friday, a band my daughter sometimes performs with was in a little town up the road at a gig right across the street from "Dave's Computer World", which is an old store where my father-in-law purchased an IBM PC XT back in the early 80's. While there I decided to check with Dave to see what he had.
Dave had a couple of boxes with sorted and labelled SIMM chips too. None were labelled 32MEG, but he had some 16 MEG, 60ns that were not marked EDO or FAST page, so I said they probably wouldn't work for me. Dave insisted that I take them home and try them, and I could come back some day and pay if they worked. I told Dave it would cost me $8 in gas to come back to pay, so why don't I just pay him now and i won't bring them back. Dave said maybe I could buy him a Coke sometime as payment and "those things have been in this box for years." So I left, sticks in hand, with nothing paid to Dave other than a promise to consider his store the next time I purchased a motherboard or other hardware.
I took the chips home but before installing them, I did a google search for the chip numbers on the IC's and found out that they were EDO chips and 32Meg sticks and Dave had them mislabelled. I installed them in the TR and low and behold they both worked, displaying 32MEG next to each SIMM entry on my startup display - yeah!
I love it when things work out.
So the moral to this story is, hit up your local mom and pop store for any old-stock or used memory -- you might just get lucky.
RankAmatuer