I decided to get my old HP 5302 counter off the shelf and repair it the other day. It had set there for a dozen years and I wanted to relocate my shop home as I was wasting too much midnight oil sleeping. After replacing a defective led driver transistor, I started looking around for leaking electros etc. I bought the counter new from HP in 1992 so I was quite surprised to see not only 1991 dated IC's but Ic's dated in the seventies and eighties. What really galled me however was the fact that most of the electros were dated 1971, my new instrument built with twenty year old electrolytics! However like all my HP and Tek 40 year old stuff it still works good so HP's NOS build hasn't affected the operation yet. Is this a common practice?