Back around the same time (92) I used one of these in a product. Worked
great as a short term battery backup. When I lost power, I would use one
of those to maintain it for a specified time period (I think it was
about 8 hours max). It's been awhile, but a cautionary word - make sure
the discharge curve fits your intended application. Having it work, and
work reliably can often times be two seperate issues.

Cheers,

Kevin

Alan King wrote:
>
>   I was junking a dictaphone transcriber thing (a
> secretarial pool kind of device, must have been 5K when new,
> around 92 or so, but now they just use PC's) that I got for
> $10 from the local university surplus.  I picked it up
> because it had a nice 4x40 backlit LCD display built in and
> it came up and worked..  It was incredibly overbuilt, small
> tight tech for the time, with passive backplane and XT hard
> drive controller and 3.5" hard drive to store the voice on.
> The backplane had some nice caps etc, but was about to throw
> it away when I noticed that the three nice black filter caps
> with gold lettering said "gold cap" on them.  Sure enough,
> those numbers really said 2.3v 10F, big F, no pesky little u
> in there!  Charged it up to 1.93v and put a superbright red
> led and 1K resistor on it, and it's still glowing well four
> hours later.
>   I can't wait to see how long I can get them to run a PIC
> doing some low power data sampling.  Definitely an
> alternative to batteries for some low power apps, about 1/2"
> shorter and 1/8" less diameter than an AA cell.  A bit
> pricey, $7.50ea from DigiKey in singles, but not as bad as I
> was expecting, and drops to around $3 each at 1K, probably
> less from some other distributors.  And the current version
> is rated 2.5v, so you only need two to start out with 10F at
> 5v.  I'm only 30, but I remember how they used to say it'd
> take a railroad car size to have a 1F cap not so very long
> ago, much less 10F.  Neat to have a small train's worth of
> cap powering your PIC..