Ben Heck found an old card swipe point of sale box at the Goodwill store, took it home, and tore it down to see what was inside.
He found a completely serviceable single board computer based on the Z80.
In fact, there's a whole family of four Z80 chips: the CPU itself, the DART chip (dual UART), the PIO chip (parallel input/output interface), and the CTC chip (counter/timer circuit).
That's not all — there's a landline telephone modem, a real time clock, 32K of RAM and UV-EPROM.
The second PCB of this assembly holds a hefty sixteen-key keypad and a sixteen-character vacuum fluorescent alphanumeric display.
All this for the bargain price of $2.99.
Source
He found a completely serviceable single board computer based on the Z80.
In fact, there's a whole family of four Z80 chips: the CPU itself, the DART chip (dual UART), the PIO chip (parallel input/output interface), and the CTC chip (counter/timer circuit).
That's not all — there's a landline telephone modem, a real time clock, 32K of RAM and UV-EPROM.
The second PCB of this assembly holds a hefty sixteen-key keypad and a sixteen-character vacuum fluorescent alphanumeric display.
All this for the bargain price of $2.99.
Source