May 12 2002
From The Space Library
NASA officials stated that NASA had used Web sites such as Yahoo! and eBay to find discontinued electronic equipment. NASA had continued to use electronic components such as 8-inch-floppy-disc drives, circuit boards, and computer chips, not in the Space Shuttles themselves, but in equipment used to service and support the Shuttles. For example, NASA had purchased outdated medical equipment to acquire the increasingly scarce Intel 8086 computer chip, a variant of the chip used in IBM's first personal computers in 1981. NASA had continued to use the Intel 8086 chip in diagnostic equipment for the Space Shuttle booster rockets, also developed in the early 1980s. Although NASA planned to develop various systems with new hardware, some crucial systems remained dependent on antiquated electronic parts. (William J. Broad, “For Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on Ebay,” New York Times, 12 May 2002.)
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