Digital Microsystems Hi-Net adapter - Z80 ISA bus card ?

[zippysticks]

Folks,

does anyone know anything about this card ?

It would appear to be a Z80 computer on an ISA bus card.

From what I can tell from searching the interweb it has a proprietary network interface called HiNet on it via the 9 way D type connector.

I saw that @SteveH was fiddling with one around 8 years ago and wondered whether anything productive could be done with the card or whether its only useful as part of a HiNet network.

 

[zippysticks]

could you take some pictures of it, and dump the firmware?

most of what I have is for the single-board computers and not an S-100 board

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/digitalMicrosystems

 

[Al Kossow]

oops, don't know why I read ISA as S-100

It's a one station intercom, not much use w/o something to talk to

 

[zippysticks]

oops, don't know why I read ISA as S-100

It's a one station intercom, not much use w/o something to talk to

Yeah, pretty much as I thought. Does it bootstrap in any way from the onboard EPROM code ? If so then I presume it MIGHT be made to do something more useful. Without any system documentation I suppose it would be difficult....

 

[SteveH]

You can boot into the card's monitor prom. The attached zip file contains an MS-DOS console program I wrote to attach to the DMS PC card.

View attachment dms_pc_card_2019-08-12.zip

I even got as far as attaching one of JonB's uIDE hard drive cards to one of these. Next step was to modify the prom to allow booting from the uIDE and then crafting a CP/M CBIOS for it. Also on my to-do list is to connect two of these DMS cards together and see if I can get them talking to each other. There's plenty of DMS info on bitsavers (thanks Al) to make this work.

some usefull links:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/digitalMicrosystems/
http://bitsavers.org/bits/DigitalMicrosystems/