It's worth bearing in mind the DEC policy on anti-static procedures for their field engineers - firstly DEC provided "Digital" watches which had an earthing stud on the wrist strap, so there was no excuse for not using a grounding lead to the system chassis or earth... Secondly, if a spare board was taken out of its anti-static bag to try in a system - and returned to it's bag using ALL the correct precautions, the board went for testing - never back into spares stock.
As has been said, the amount of static required to damage chips is in the 10's of volts - and often less than 15 volts for modern ram and CPU parts - but damage doesn't mean "instant failure" - it means the part is damaged internally and WILL fail sooner. Maybe an hour - maybe a month, maybe longer - but it is degraded, permanently.
So many people think PCs all crash / blue screen as a matter of course, but they do not when built using anti-static precautions and good practices. I have seen sellers at computer fairs wiping ram and CPU contacts on shirts and worse, before selling the parts in plain plastic bags - it makes me cringe. I have had systems run for months between reboots and in some cases up to two years and almost never see blue screen crashes on the hundreds of systems I have built and installed.
Good practice matters - and the CPUs are MOS chips on the 11/73 and 11/83 boards... Do you want to risk yours?
