I sometimes ground my chair through a 1-meg resistor when I'm feeling zaps during dry winter months. Also, run some copper tape along front edge of workbench, through 1-meg to ground, as a place to conveniently touch.

My bout with damaged chips was when I was programming early EPROM microcontrollers, and a zapped chip bore a strong resemblance to a firmware bug, so it was a frustrating time until I discovered the actual cause.