I've sort of given up salvaging parts. I have decades worth of salvaged parts (from equipment, from surplus, free samples, show giveaways, stuff from dumpsters where work threw out brand new or slightly used parts, from ebay and surplus dealer sales that I thought were too good to pass up, etc...)
And now I have piles of largely obsolete parts that are unlikely to be used, require special tools and programmers that are nearly unavailable, have unpopular values, and can't be obtained if anyone wanted to duplicate my project, or if I wanted to build them in bulk. 27C512 EPROMS. 4bit microcontrollers. ATmega48 microcontrollers (cause that was "big memory" back then.) 8kbyte and 2kbyte static RAM chips. (shucks. 1kbit static RAM chips!) CPLDS, FPGAs, SIMS, and DIMMS in at least half-a-dozen obsolete styles. Stuff that was discontinued, from companies that don't exist any more.
Further, the brand-new equivalents are pretty readily available and pretty cheap. (or were, before the current global shortages.)
(huh. The most useful "old" parts have been "indicator" LEDs; the sort of thing you use for "power", TX, and RX indicators on an Arduino board. I've got a reel of 3mm RED LEDs (on sale!), and a drawer full of green 3mm LEDs (pulled from boards and removed from holders.) And they actually get used, when I'm building something that uses TH LEDs.)
Sigh.
