Electronic – Are DIP sockets against overheating worth the cost

If there is adequate clearance, a typical screwdriver will work very nicely for removing DIPs from sockets. Insert the blade between the socket and the chip (not under the socket!), then twist gently in alternate directions to raise the two sides of the chip. Apply gentle pressure on the side of the chip opposite the side being raised, near the corner where the screwdriver is being used, to ensure that both ends of the chip rise by about the same amount.

One "tool" that's even better than a screwdriver, though I'm not sure where you can find one, is the L-shaped metal piece from an old-style PC case which screwed in to cover up the holes where I/O cards go. Not sure how best to describe it. Old-style PC cases are a bit hard to find these days, though.

BTW, I've yet to find a chip extractor tool that worked better on DIPs than the above-mentioned PC case piece.

While today's computer-assisted manufacturing would make it relatively inexpensive to create and manufacture new styles of lead frames, tooling used to be much more complicated and expensive, and there were relatively few discrete sizes of chips. As chip production increased, manufacturers may have had to produce new tools simply to keep up with demand (if one has a four punches to produce DIP14 lead frames, one can only produce four such lead frames at a time), but they would have had more inclination to add tools for sizes that were slightly larger than existing ones (so they could offer chips that could do things previously not possible) than for sizes that were smaller. The only real use for a 10-12 pin DIP would have been for an application where an 8-pin chip would have been insufficient, but a 14-pin part would have been too big. Even before the invention of surface-mount technology, there weren't many such applications, and once surface-mount technology came on scene there really weren't any: someone who needed a chip with 9-12 useful connections but couldn't afford the size of a 14-pin DIP wouldn't use a 10-12 pin DIP--they'd use a surface-mount part instead.