Mystery Card

[TMA-1]

I've been mining a long-forgotten junk box of electronics parts and PCBs, looking for buried treasures. I've found one card I probably I bought in the 90's from a local surplus store as scrap electronics, but never got around to harvesting. Now I'm curious--just what is it?

It identifies as a "FEDAC Processor Card" by Frederick Engineering, but my Google-Fu comes up largely empty. What's a FEDAC in its natural habitat?

Some sort of 8-bit PC card, it has 512K of RAM, a couple of ROMs, some crystals, a big serial processor chip of some sort, a whack of logic, and a massive 50-pin interface on the backplate.

Does anyone have a clue what it might have been used for?

 

[eswan]

My guess is there's a '286 hiding under that metal plate. Should be able to slide it to one side a bit, then it pops up. As to the cards purpose, it looks like a data acquisition card, I've got a similar card somewhere from National Instruments.

 

[the3dfxdude]

FEDAC is likely an acronym: Federick Engineering Data Acquisition Card. Or Digital to Analog Converter.

 

[TMA-1]

Thank-you both. The processor turns out to be an 80186, but you're absolutely right. A computer within a computer--I'll bet this sucker was a costly item in its day! I saved up for months to expand my 8088 Eagle Spirit PC to 640K with the swap-in of two banks of 41256 chips. Too bad this board isn't socketed. And "Frederick Engineering Data Acquisition Card" just sounds right.

Thanks again.

 

[Al Kossow]

FE made serial protocol analyzers, which would explain why there is an SCC on there

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'm with Al on this one--and you're missing an important piece to this thing, the Interface Pod as well as the software to run the thing.