> no ethical company will sell customers used silicon
Since when? My first EE job was in 1988 and back then "pulls" -- components pulled from circuit boards were an easy way to get cheap parts. We'd get mailers every week from various companies listing what they had available. The electronics recycling industry was/is huge.
Good point that I hadn't thought of. I figured that the reason I hadn't seen any pulls in recent memory was because I didn't work in the segment of industry that was so cost-sensitive any more.
While we only used DIPs at that time, most of the pulls that I remember weren't removed from sockets: they had clearly been desoldered.
Since when? My first EE job was in 1988 and back then "pulls" -- components pulled from circuit boards were an easy way to get cheap parts. We'd get mailers every week from various companies listing what they had available. The electronics recycling industry was/is huge.