At 11:21 AM 5/23/96 -0500, you wrote:

>But isn't the first thing one does with an expensive CERDIP part to place
>it into a nice machined socket, like these Mill-Max parts I have the '73s in?
>
>Actually, I'm sure that this will fail for a sufficently fast part, but
>how fast is too fast?  The '73 is perfectly happy, but I'm only clocking
>it at 4MHz 'cause that's the design target.
>

I would imagine that the speed where this is a problem is well past the
fastest PIC.  You really aren't adding that much distance or capacitance to
the circuit doing this.  I have seen this work in a 50MHz logic board that
used this method to get a logic probe onto the pins of an FPGA.