How do you package something half the size of a grain of rice? They're set up for automated installation, so they come packaged in a strip of plastic called a tape. Here's a picture of some cut tape:
See the bumps in the back of the plastic tape? Those are little pockets containing the transistors. The greenish rectangles with the silver pins are the Surfboard® prototyping adapter boards, and the tiny black rectangles in the upper corner of the Surfboards are the transistors mounted on them.
The plastic bag is made of a static-protective material, and the cut tape comes inside that.
Does it work? Oh, yeah, it works. I have a bunch of modern microcontroller chips known as PICs made by a company creatively named Microchip left over from an old project. I programmed one to drive the DRAM control signals with timing similar to the 4004 and wired it up on a solderless breadboard. To that I added the DRAM cell and the other transistors needed to drive it just as the 4004 would.
The results were very encouraging. I tested it slow speed to make sure the DRAM would hold its state longer than a 4004 would need it to, and I tested it running as fast as the PIC would run the program, which produced timing almost as fast as the fastest a 4004 could run.
Cool, eh?
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