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Another round of closet cleaning - Laptop - tapedrive - ISA cards

Darshevo

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 9, 2009
Messages
206
Location
Eastern Washington
In my seemingly never ending task of getting all my gear in 1 place and eliminating what I don't intend to play with I have these items today:

Toshiba Satellite Pro 405/CS Laptop - 40 MB ram, 775 MB HD, CD drive (no floppy), Pentium processor. Powers up and loads to Win 95. Runs off of AC power only - the battery isn't just dead, its gone. Sits inside a compartment, so the machine looks complete. $25.00 SOLD!

Iomega Ditto 800 external tape drive. Comes with install disks, AC adapter, 1 tape, and various documentation. $10.00 SOLD!


486 motherboard with Intel 486DX-33 CPU. AMI Bios. Battery will need to be replaced, its starting to leak, but hasn't done any damage to the board. $10.00 SOLD!

386 motherboard with AMD 386 DX/DXL 40 CPU. AMI Bios. Battery will need to be replaced, its starting to leak, but hasn't done any damage to the board. SPM 386-40/33C. $10.00 SOLD!

VTEL Lynx and Promptus I/O board - Came out of a video conferencing machine. $10.00

Unknown Keytronic (KTC) 8 bit ISA card with 9 pin connector. Main chip is an NEC D8255AC-2. $5.00

PCI Parallel card with driver disk (I know not even close to vintage, but seemed a shame to make a new thread for it) $5.00

Prices do not include shipping - PM me with your zip and I will get you a quote


V-tel Cards

vtel_01.jpg


vtel_02.jpg


vtel_03.jpg


vtel_04.jpg


Keytronic ISA

ktc.jpg


Parallel PCI Card

parallel.jpg
 
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Whoa, that little grey 8-bit ISA card with a d-sub connector...do we know exactly what that is?

Anyone know if that could be a variant of the 3270 PC's keyboard card? If so I might just be interested for research purposes.
 
Whoa, that little grey 8-bit ISA card with a d-sub connector...do we know exactly what that is?

Anyone know if that could be a variant of the 3270 PC's keyboard card? If so I might just be interested for research purposes.

It's not any variant I am aware of, and doesn't have the EPROM for the BIOS extension. I'm not able to read the NEC chip, but that will give a good clue to the actual function. Later I'll post pictures of the three keyboard/timer cards I know about.

Being marked as from "Keytronic", it could have a similiar function for one of their keyboards...
 
Whoa, that little grey 8-bit ISA card with a d-sub connector...do we know exactly what that is?

Anyone know if that could be a variant of the 3270 PC's keyboard card? If so I might just be interested for research purposes.

It doesn't look right for that. The 8255 is, of course, a parallel interface chip; given the clustering of resistors in the upper right corner (without being able to see what the chip is), I'd guess that this is an interface card for an external keypad or perhaps a pointing device. The '245 is a bus transceiver and I suspect that the small ICs on the other side of the 8255 have to do with address decoding and interrupt handling.
 
It's not any variant I am aware of, and doesn't have the EPROM for the BIOS extension. I'm not able to read the NEC chip, but that will give a good clue to the actual function. Later I'll post pictures of the three keyboard/timer cards I know about.

Being marked as from "Keytronic", it could have a similiar function for one of their keyboards...

Keytronic is what clued me in for sure. I think they also made terminal keyboards at some point.

Good point about the lack of EPROM. It would be neat to figure out what this thing does. I tried to find the link I thought you provided a while back to your info on those cards but I couldn't remember what thread it was in.

or perhaps a pointing device

It just struck me that it looks somewhat similar to a Microsoft InPort bus mouse card, only of course with the wrong connector. Was Keytronic involved with making mice at any point?

For some reason I'm imagining a Keytronic InPort mouse competitor.

Edit: on second thought, it seems a bit more complex than an InPort card...
http://media.photobucket.com/image/microsoft inport/john-a-s/Microsoft/1985 Bus Mouse/ms_inport.jpg
 
The numbers off of the big IC: NEC D8255AC-2 8814P5012, the smaller ones are SN74LS245N, SN74LS688N, S=B8824, 7801 64H101, P8812/B CD4020BCN

EDIT: Also, the jumper set is marked IRQ 2 3 4 5 with 5 being selected.

I can't believe how many obscure pieces I have acquired - overwhelming.

-Lance
 
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Keytronic is what clued me in for sure. I think they also made terminal keyboards at some point.

Good point about the lack of EPROM. It would be neat to figure out what this thing does. I tried to find the link I thought you provided a while back to your info on those cards but I couldn't remember what thread it was in...

You know where John´s picture is. I have an adapter just like his (except the EPROM code version, his is between the versions I have). The other short adapter (with an 8250 UART, for a non-standard pinout serial port) I have is here.

Another adapter I have with the 3270 PC keyboard adapter circuitry is full-length, with a smaller daughtercard for RAM expansion (it also has an LPT, COM, and RTC). No pictures yet of it up. Of course it is more heavily populated with ICs too.

Common aspects between the adapters are a 40-pin Motorola DIP marked with an IBM-like ¨1503828¨, ¨XE¨, ¨[datecode 8337 to 8527]A [¨XM¨or ¨MA¨]¨, ¨SC81155P¨. ROM versions are ¨632358x¨, where ´x´ is a 1, 2, or 6 (´2´ seems earlier than ´1´), or ¨107A140¨ (the latest version so far, copyrighted 1985). There also an Intel 8253-5 timer chip on all adapters.
 
You know where John´s picture is. I have an adapter just like his (except the EPROM code version, his is between the versions I have). The other short adapter (with an 8250 UART, for a non-standard pinout serial port) I have is here.

Another adapter I have with the 3270 PC keyboard adapter circuitry is full-length, with a smaller daughtercard for RAM expansion (it also has an LPT, COM, and RTC). No pictures yet of it up. Of course it is more heavily populated with ICs too.

Common aspects between the adapters are a 40-pin Motorola DIP marked with an IBM-like ¨1503828¨, ¨XE¨, ¨[datecode 8337 to 8527]A [¨XM¨or ¨MA¨]¨, ¨SC81155P¨. ROM versions are ¨632358x¨, where ´x´ is a 1, 2, or 6 (´2´ seems earlier than ´1´), or ¨107A140¨ (the latest version so far, copyrighted 1985). There also an Intel 8253-5 timer chip on all adapters.

Is it safe to say the card is definitely performing more functions than just interpreting the keyboard signals? I'm by no means an electrical engineer but the designs seem way more complicated than they need to be for such a relatively simple function as that (by which I mean, it would seem the card is physically housing a couple of different smaller devices that couldn't justify each having their own dedicated card)

About my idea about a bus mouse of some kind...does that seem like a possible use of the card? Someone had mentioned pointing device so my mind kind of went there with it. Quick Googling doesn't find a Keytronic bus mouse, but they definitely do and did make mice, and they were around at the (very short) time where bus mice were popular...I dunno, just an idea.
 
Is it safe to say the card is definitely performing more functions than just interpreting the keyboard signals? I'm by no means an electrical engineer but the designs seem way more complicated than they need to be for such a relatively simple function as that (by which I mean, it would seem the card is physically housing a couple of different smaller devices that couldn't justify each having their own dedicated card)...

The ¨keyboard¨ card (I am generalizing for all three adapters I know of, and excluding the enhancements of the full-length board that are directed towards upgrading the functionality of the PC side of things) of the 3270 PC also holds the code to run the particular display adapter, and is also checking (in most instances, see below) if the 3270 emulation adapter is present. I don´t know what the 8253 timer does there, and John has almost all of the legwork for me to understand it as well as I do.

My current theory is that the ¨1503893¨ keyboard card he has is the earliest (albeit with a later firmware of the identical adapter I have) or adds the least functionality. My short ¨2683113¨ adds the non-standard serial port connection, probably for running the tablet or pointer of the more higher-end 3270 PC/G or 3270 PC/GX. The full-length adapter seems to add the PC enhancements on one card to free up other slots.

There also seems to be three different versions of the 3270 emulation adapter. A ¨long¨ adapter (like John has pictured, I don´t have that version) was the first. Next was the first ¨short¨card, which would give a false ¨2801¨ (meaning the emulation adapter was not detected) error on boot if you had an older version of the firmware on the keyboard card. This adapter (the older ¨long¨adapter couldn´t be put in a short slot behind the drives anyway) has a single switch to set whether the adapter is in slot 8 or 1 through 7 on the XT motherboard.

A second short version even had documentation included to note it would give a false 2801 error with any version of the keyboard card functionality. The irony is that the full-length keyboard card adapter, with the newest firmware that John and I have found, will not give the 2801 error when the 3270 adapter is not actually present! So it gives the error that the card is missing when it is present, and when the card is present, it gives the error that it is not.

¨Keyboard error, press any key to continue¨...

But it does also bring up the prospect that the full-length adapter could be used with a different emulation (say 5250) or a different connection (SDLC) than the coax of the 3270 emulation card...

The second short version of the 3270 emulation adapter also had the switch to select slot 8 or 1 through 7 on the XT. There was two other switches on the card that let you set the I/O address to have as many as four adapters present in the same system. Of course you had to have the software to support that multi-session functionality.
 
I can't find any information on a 64H101, except that it was a 16-pin DIP made by Fujitsu and Toshiba--and that various Chinese "pull" houses have lots of them.

At least the date code on the ICs puts this about 1988.

I don't have an inkling of what a 64H101 is and the web is no help.

Could it be a keyboard interface? Sure, but there's no way of telling from a photo. In any case, there's no ROM chip on board, so software for it would be a bit of a problem.
 
To head the "keyboard card" discussion off from considering the 3270 AT (same concept, with the adapters being added to an AT chassis instead of an XT), my research (I don't have a 3270 AT or seemingly any of the adapters for it) indicates that the 3270 AT keyboard card is much more "complex", has the same Motorola-branded 1503828 40-pin DIP, and more than one EPROM for the BIOS extension.

I don't know if the keyboard card BIOS extentions for the 3270 AT are the same as from the 3270 PC. The warning on the last 3270 emulation adapter only talks about it giving a false error with the 3270 PC keyboard adapter versions. That could be that the error is neutralized on the 3270 AT, 3270 ATs are later than the emulation adapter documentation (the 3270 emulation cards for the PC stayed as 8-bit, just like the microchannel versions stayed 16-bit), or that the 3270 AT wasn't considered for the documentation.
 
All the cards pictured are still available. With the weather going downhill fast here I will be starting to get serious about clearing out my collection.

-Lance
 
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