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What is this? Post Photos of Mystery Items Here (vintage computers only)

Wow! That is some beautiful rope memory right there. Looks hand wired, even. Being hamfest, having audio jacks and an internal speaker, this very much appears to be a transmitter to me. There's a chance that it even receives and auto-decodes, my guess is morse or baudot, which are common in the amateur radio world. I've got a couple devices like this in my collection, very similar almost handmade seemingly industrial design.
 
Great looking find! My guess is that it is (in part) a hobbyist built morse code keyer, like this modern one. It has the same options for speed, tone, weight, volume, and input jack for the key. It has a switch for selecting the external morse code key as input or the keyboard. I would assume the keyboard was probably meant for sending RTTY.
 
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Here is a mystery board with what appears a 64-pin CPU (illumination makes the type illegible). It is one of a small set of boards whose origin is unknown.

The board in the photos has the markings in yellow:
D/PC 504167/1-SS ISS C. 804167 SER NO 195.

And these markings are on the component side in the solder surface:
0804167 D/PC504167/1-2 ISS E

Date codes on the ICs are in the range 1974-1978.

The bus interface appears to have 46 pins. The power/GND contacts at the edges of the connectors appear to have narrower spacing than the edge connector contacts in the centre, but next to IC16 there is a group of three contacts with closer spacing.

The crystal has the name CATHODEON FS5901 [11] 9.8304M [Hz] ENGLAND.

This may suggest that the board is part of a system made in UK.

Any information about the system in which the board was originally used would be very welcome

Jon Hales, UK
 

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An initial comment on my recent posting. A search returned the information that:

"the TI TMS9900 and the Motorola 68000 had 16-bit external data busses, no multiplexing, and came in a 64-pin DIP package".

Close inspection of the CPU photo suggests it could be a TMSxxxx. I had noted that many (but not all) of the TTL ICs were TI branded.

Here's a photo of a 'pageable 8k RAM' card populated with 22-pin TI 4060JDL chips with 1979 and 1980 date codes.
 

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The perplexing thing about that card is the presence of 75322 MOS-to-TTL drivers. The crystal frequency is one that can be divided down to standard (e.g. 9600 bps) transmission rates; it's also used in the satellite comms biz.

I don't see anything here that screams "CPU" to me. ASIC or DSP or specialized comms chip perhaps.
 
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Here is an 8 bit ISA card I've had in my collection for a long time now and I have absolutely no idea who made it or what it does. I don't have the card handy but there is either nothing on the back or nothing that has ever produced any useful google search results.

IIRC it came out of a 386 PC that I got from a horticultural research institute about 18 years back. Probably when this card, and the PC it was in, was made that organisation would have been part of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research so its possible the PC was just inherited by this organisation and was originally used for some purpose unrelated to horticultural research.
 

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Bought a CompuAdd 316sl but it didn't come with a power brick. So far I've been unable to find a power supply for it, and I've never seen a connector like this. Anyone have a name for it, or even know which pins do what?

316sl power.jpg
 
NeXT said:
I call it the "printer power connector" because I see it a lot on receipt printers. Usually they are 24v but don't trust that on a laptop.
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I mean, worst case scenario is that I could get a similar connector from mouser and just gradually crank up the bench supply? The batteries I see for it are 12v 2400mAh, so is it safe to assume that the power supply would be 12v?

Edit: Somehow in my previous searches I missed this, but I found this video to help me along.
 
andreMKE said:
Bought a CompuAdd 316sl but it didn't come with a power brick. So far I've been unable to find a power supply for it, and I've never seen a connector like this. Anyone have a name for it, or even know which pins do what?

View attachment 1248913
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This is shockingly similar to the power connector used on the Epson TM-H6000V receipt printers we use at work. Not sure if same pinout or voltage, but these adapters are still in production and plentiful. They are clones of the IBM SureMark 4610, though I'm not sure if those use the same adapter.
 
davidrg said:
Here is an 8 bit ISA card I've had in my collection for a long time now and I have absolutely no idea who made it or what it does. I don't have the card handy but there is either nothing on the back or nothing that has ever produced any useful google search results.

IIRC it came out of a 386 PC that I got from a horticultural research institute about 18 years back. Probably when this card, and the PC it was in, was made that organisation would have been part of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research so its possible the PC was just inherited by this organisation and was originally used for some purpose unrelated to horticultural research.
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Well the IN port BNC cable is routed up near that Neon flash tube which were used at the time as a shunt so they were certainly concerned about high voltage transients.

You can look at what pins are attached on the isa slot to determine what I/O lines are hooked by the card since there doesn't appear to be jumpers for setting that configuration.

My guess would be the card changed a mostly analog signal over to a digital. This was definitely the era of weird custom solutions. If you know someone with a chip reader you can maybe dump further information out of the PAL (stickered chip) or you could try just putting it in a 386 and seeing if an extra boot message occurs when you turn on the computer which might identify the manufacturer.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Well, have a look at the video here:


Power supply appears to be 15V from what the author can determine. Lots of bad caps, dead RTC--the usual stuff.
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The 15v would be so that the 12v battery coud be charged while still operating the notebook. The weird plug type was simply so it couldn't be plugged in wrong, and so you had to use their supply. I've seen something similar on powered speakers, other laptops and as other people have mentioned printers. You can never assume what voltages are in use but if you open it up you can usually tell which ones are positive and which ones are negative. Some of those devices even ran 12V-24V AC instead of DC. Only the internal powersuply configuration would tell you for sure.
 
I got these two external drive cases from Computer Reset. The data connections look like "28-pin mini-SCSI" if that ever was a thing. The connectors are about 1 inch long. Via Googling, I haven't found any connectors that resemble these, nor do I have such a connection on any computer I got from Computer Reset. Please enlighten me. Thanks!

1674450615000.png
 
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Can't quite make it out, but is it an IEEE 1284 type C connector?
1280_sAgJVujZrD11IoYf.jpg
 
The A/B switch reminds me of something that was used on the docking station for the Compaq LTE Lite.
I vaguely recall from the manual for the same laptop a similar looking 5/25" box was available for an external drive, but I can't remember if it was for floppy or fixed disk...or CD. Presumably floppy and the A/B switch toggled how the drives appeared to the laptop.
 
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