shank
Experienced Member
anyone know what these boards are?
technical support produced these "Port 80 Diagnostic Boards" in december 1988.
valerie see did the design, wrapped the prototypes, worked with the fab to do the layout and production of pre-pro runs and final production.
there are 2 wire wrap versions here: the wrap of the version that was produced. this wrapped board has 2 additional LED segments because the originals were no longer available in the quantity needed. the stuffed PCB version is a pre-pro but very similar to the ones produced and provided to the shops.
the second version included diagnostics for IDE hard drives, but this one was never produced. at this time our shops were having difficulty determining whether drive subsystem failures were due to the controller or the "bubbles," as we called them at that time. this board was designed to help with that.
both versions worked in conjunction with diagnostic software.
The diagnostic software was both in ROM basic diagnostics for motherboard failures (such as memory, drive controllers, etc), and on floppy disk (which could be used to troubleshoot more difficult problems on machines that would actually boot from disk). The port 80 LEDs would of course also tell techs what the BIOS ROM error message was if the machine was too screwed up to boot, along with the "beep codes" the BIOS ROMS would produce.
-kb
technical support produced these "Port 80 Diagnostic Boards" in december 1988.
valerie see did the design, wrapped the prototypes, worked with the fab to do the layout and production of pre-pro runs and final production.
there are 2 wire wrap versions here: the wrap of the version that was produced. this wrapped board has 2 additional LED segments because the originals were no longer available in the quantity needed. the stuffed PCB version is a pre-pro but very similar to the ones produced and provided to the shops.
the second version included diagnostics for IDE hard drives, but this one was never produced. at this time our shops were having difficulty determining whether drive subsystem failures were due to the controller or the "bubbles," as we called them at that time. this board was designed to help with that.
both versions worked in conjunction with diagnostic software.
The diagnostic software was both in ROM basic diagnostics for motherboard failures (such as memory, drive controllers, etc), and on floppy disk (which could be used to troubleshoot more difficult problems on machines that would actually boot from disk). The port 80 LEDs would of course also tell techs what the BIOS ROM error message was if the machine was too screwed up to boot, along with the "beep codes" the BIOS ROMS would produce.
-kb
