Industrial Alchemy is what happens when the junk drawer wins and gets a museum.
The site went online in 2006 and has now crossed the funny threshold where a website about vintage technology is itself vintage technology. It is still being updated.
Its Technology Museum is organized by component type rather than by famous product. That creates categories normal museums rarely bother with: Geissler tubes, Nixie displays, Dekatrons, Numitrons, magic-eye tubes, magnetrons, klystrons, photomultipliers, CRTs, VFDs, early semiconductor devices, calculators, and assorted instrumentation.
The archive is strongest when the hardware is obscure enough that a model number would otherwise lead nowhere.
Components deserve histories too
A computer museum might preserve a complete machine. Industrial Alchemy preserves the things inside machines and the strange devices between categories.
Recent additions have included an early Western Electric point-contact transistor, unusual LED modules, a Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer, obscure Nixie tubes, and an enormous hybrid countermeasures processor used in the U.S. Army’s Cobra helicopter. That last module contains a forest of bond wires and dozens of semiconductor dies inside a hermetic metal package.
The site provides photographs, descriptions, and datasheets when available.
That sounds simple until you need to identify an unlabeled display module pulled from old equipment.
Component history is difficult because parts were designed to disappear into products. When the product dies, the individual tube or IC often becomes an anonymous object in a bin. A hand-built catalog can preserve the visual cues, packaging, manufacturer, and application long after the original sales literature vanishes.
The site also maintains the personality of the older technical web. Its updates discuss Hamvention flea-market booths, weird acquisitions, and the pleasure of finding obsolete hardware that absolutely nobody needed to save.
That is very much CacheRat territory. The 1,967 Ancient Web Domains list was built to locate exactly these deep specialist archives before search reduces them to a forgotten result on page twelve.
There are museums for computers.
Industrial Alchemy remembers the glowing orange thing that made one number appear inside them.