commodorejohn
Veteran Member
Well, unfortunately but unsurprisingly the pictures turned out essentially unrecognizable, so text will have to suffice. I got it home and brought it in. The damage to the plastic enclosure is a bit more substantial than I'd thought (cracks here and there, bits of the vent grilles bent out of place, and the back plate is also missing,) and the plastic is quite grungy (I'll give it a cleaning this weekend,) but it's still structurally sound and will hold it just fine once I've got it back together, so it'll do for my purposes until such time as I spot a decent enclosure on eBay for a reasonable price.
The BA-23 box and the equipment within, on the other hand, look to be in marvelous shape. There's almost no dust build-up and definitely no corrosion; the worst damage is a bit of a bend in the I/O backplate where the CPU-card serial ports were; I think it got dropped on its back end and the serial-port card was shoved in, but the PCB itself seems perfectly fine; a pair of chewed-up gender-changers seem to have taken the brunt of it. Still crossing my fingers about the hard drive, though.
Anyway, the contents. The model number is 11E23-FD, so I guess it's some kind of 11/23. It's a pretty simple setup; only the top four slots are occupied. Slots 1, 3, and 4 have quad cards. The CPU card in slot 1 says M8189, "KDF11-BA 11/23 CPU W/NO ROM SET" according to this catalog. (On the other hand, mine does have a couple EPROMs in sockets along the side of the board.)
Immediately below it is the odd man out, a "CST CC3300" and the only non-DEC card in the bunch. This is the one that connects to that 50-pin ribbon-cable connector, and I have no idea what it is and can't find any information on it. It does sport a pair of AMD ICs, one of which is a 7901; from its datasheet, a "subscriber-line audio processing circuit" containing an ADC and a DAC for phone-signal output - so I guess this was used in some kind of telecom function. This is the one half card, in the AB section of slot 2.
Slot 3 has the RAM card, an M8067 which is half-populated; I see from elsewhere that this is 128KB. Is it possible to up this to 256KB simply by soldering in additional RAM? The ICs are "21-18470-01," which I can't seem to find much on. (Edit: evidently this is a DEC part number for 4164 DRAMs, and also I misunderstood - it's 128KW, or 256KB, when half-populated. Presumably it could then go up to 512KB, but can my current CPU card even address more than 256KB?)
Slot 4 has the disk controller, which is an M8639 and says "RQRX" on the board, though other sites say it's an "RQDX1."
The hard disk is an RD52A, which seems to be somewhere around 32MB.
I haven't plugged it in yet, because I wasn't sure if the power supplies in these things can be a danger this far removed from their date of manufacture. Would it be best to disconnect power from everything but the power switch on the front panel, and try switching it on to make sure that no smoke pours out?
The BA-23 box and the equipment within, on the other hand, look to be in marvelous shape. There's almost no dust build-up and definitely no corrosion; the worst damage is a bit of a bend in the I/O backplate where the CPU-card serial ports were; I think it got dropped on its back end and the serial-port card was shoved in, but the PCB itself seems perfectly fine; a pair of chewed-up gender-changers seem to have taken the brunt of it. Still crossing my fingers about the hard drive, though.
Anyway, the contents. The model number is 11E23-FD, so I guess it's some kind of 11/23. It's a pretty simple setup; only the top four slots are occupied. Slots 1, 3, and 4 have quad cards. The CPU card in slot 1 says M8189, "KDF11-BA 11/23 CPU W/NO ROM SET" according to this catalog. (On the other hand, mine does have a couple EPROMs in sockets along the side of the board.)
Immediately below it is the odd man out, a "CST CC3300" and the only non-DEC card in the bunch. This is the one that connects to that 50-pin ribbon-cable connector, and I have no idea what it is and can't find any information on it. It does sport a pair of AMD ICs, one of which is a 7901; from its datasheet, a "subscriber-line audio processing circuit" containing an ADC and a DAC for phone-signal output - so I guess this was used in some kind of telecom function. This is the one half card, in the AB section of slot 2.
Slot 3 has the RAM card, an M8067 which is half-populated; I see from elsewhere that this is 128KB. Is it possible to up this to 256KB simply by soldering in additional RAM? The ICs are "21-18470-01," which I can't seem to find much on. (Edit: evidently this is a DEC part number for 4164 DRAMs, and also I misunderstood - it's 128KW, or 256KB, when half-populated. Presumably it could then go up to 512KB, but can my current CPU card even address more than 256KB?)
Slot 4 has the disk controller, which is an M8639 and says "RQRX" on the board, though other sites say it's an "RQDX1."
The hard disk is an RD52A, which seems to be somewhere around 32MB.
I haven't plugged it in yet, because I wasn't sure if the power supplies in these things can be a danger this far removed from their date of manufacture. Would it be best to disconnect power from everything but the power switch on the front panel, and try switching it on to make sure that no smoke pours out?
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I'll do some power-supply tests in the morning.