Those first few boards are Intel Multibus cards. The reason they don't look like the picture you saw in the Wikipedia article is because the cards you have are Multibus I (IEEE 796) whereas the card pictured on Wikipedia is a Multibus II (IEEE-1296) card. (The Multibus II spec was released in the late 80s, so long after those boards you have were made.) Multibus was used in a lot of industrial systems . It was also used in a lot of 80s and early 90s UNIX systems from HP, Sun, and SGI. The Sun-1 and Sun-2, for example, were 68000-based systems that used Multibus I in order to take advantage of peripheral cards that had been designed for Intel Multibus systems.
The Wikipedia article also mentioned that 8089 IO processor being used in the "Intel System 86" -- so I Googled that, and found a "System 86/330A Overview Manual" (this one published in June 1982) which shows a desktop chassis with multiple cards in it, about the right size. The contents lists a CPU board, a 256K memory board, a Winchester controller board, and a floppy disk controller board. Sounds like a match to me!
I have about a dozen of these cards and 2 of the Intel low profile rack mount chassis for them (model SBC 655). I have a couple of 8080A CPU cards (80/20), a couple 8085A CPU cards (80/05), a couple of memory and I/O expansion cards, and a couple of DAC cards (by DATEL). These were used in the USGS DWWSSN seismic stations that were deployed around the world in the '80s. I will be firing these up for our next vintage computer club meet in Albuquerque.
This unlocked a deep memory for me. My parents had a computer with the multibus boards for their business back in the 80s. Haven't seen those dual connectors since I was a kid.
10:35 The 9.8304 MHz crystal is used for the serial I/O. Divide that frequency nine times by two and you get 19,200 Hz. In the vicinity we find an Intel 8251 USART which supports up to 19.2K Baud for asynchronous transfers. Doesn't sound like a coincidence, does it? ;-) The crystal isn't connected directly to it, though. It needs to be fed by a baud rate generator. Above the 8251 we discover both the MC1488 and 1489 chips so we know that we are dealing with RS-232 hardware here (next to the connector...).
That card has serial and parallel! It's an Intel iSBC 30 board (or similar) which given enough support hardware can be made to attempt a POST with the built in routines and monitor.
For the Intel Multibus cards, one person who might be able to get them working would be David of the "Usagi Electric" TH-cam channel. He was at the most recent VCF East with his Centurion system.
Nowadays, we understand an SBC as a truly complete system on a single board like a Raspberry Pie for example. But back then an SBC meant that there was a "complete set of components" on a single board with which you could work: CPU, "BIOS" ROM, RAM and at least a serial port to connect a terminal to it. With a bus connector like the Intel Multibus shown here you could obviously expand your SBC into a more fully fledged system. There were many different systems like this around back then.
@@kaitlyn__L I don't have the Intel manuals the other poster mentioned. It simply is what it is (or rather "was" at the time). The quotes were meant for emphasis as "complete" is only an opinion and the (EP)ROM chip on a CPU board wasn't always called a BIOS but often a monitor, for example.
That is what it became, in its early days it was an actual computer bus like SCSI but it was quickly outdated, being an 8 bit bus. The origin was HPIB but that was patented so the industry circumvented that by creating the GPIB "copy".
@@goranekstrom708 almost: HP were fully cooperative with it becoming an industry standard, you just can't use company names in standard names. Same reason SASI became SCSI, even though Shugart again were part of the effort.
Those sonnet crescendo cards are great, hope that makes it to someone who can use it. That NewerTech card is a mac upgrade too. Pretty universal one for mid 90s machines that use that type of CPU card.
The Intel board is a Multibus board for industrial computer- iSBC-056 256k RAM board. A GPIB Board would be IEEE-488 related, like that used on the PET
Re: Top Down Camera ... I can see a hot spot reflecting off the circuit board. It might not look obvious but it's like taking a flash picture at a mirror. The camera is trying to compensate for a light source in the picture. Try putting a mirror on your table and see if the camera can see a light source.
As an owner of an Intel Multibus system that barely functions due to faulty parts, I am extremely envious of your newfound collection of Multibus cards..!! :D Edit: Adrian, if you do not want to keep those Multibus cards, I will happily pay for them and shipping costs to Australia!
That's the original version of the isbc-215 that requires a external adapter for st-406 drives rather than the generic 215g variant that supports them directly. The documentation for it is at bitsavers.
26:13 - This is a Sonnet Crescendo G3, which is an upgrade processor for PowerPC 601-based Power Macs. It mentions 3 models on the card specifically: PowerMac 7100, PowerMac 8100, PowerMac 6100AV. It is known compatible with the 7100 and 8100, it is incompatible with the 6100AV and incompatible with DOS-compatible machines, however; it will work in any other 601-based PowerMac with a Processor Direct Slot, or "PDS." It has a maximum frequency of 400MHz, 64k of level 1 cache, 1mb of level 2 cache, and supports MacOS 8.5-9.0. Retail was $700. 27:18 - This is a Newer Technology MAXpowr G3 250, which is an upgrade processor for PowerPC 604(e)-based Power Macs. It is compatible with the PowerMac 7300-7600, 8500-9600, as well as some PowerComputing and Umax Macintosh clones. It replaces any stock daughtercard, and plugs into said daughtercard slot. It has a maximum frequency of 250MHz (hence the 250 name), 64k of level 1 cache, 512k of level 2 cache, and supports MacOS 8.0-9.0. Retail was $550. These are really cool and a good find!
I have the same 250MHz Newer Technology MAXPowr G3 card in my “Kansas” 9600, very nice card. I also have XLR8 MACh Carrier G3 card somewhere that I haven’t tried yet. I believe it is a 400MHz G3.
So that AZ-COM card there is something rather special indeed; that's a PCI bus analysis and hot-plug validation board. The risers segment can be configured to mimic cPCI passive extenders for cPCI analysis as well. The missing SW2 would be the bus swap in/out as I recall; that toggle at the rear is probably for switching between 5V and 3.3V. I actually did a very similar modification. The Twin Industries 5EXTM is a 32-bit board specifically for backprobe and testing on 4-layer PCBs; they still make several versions of it to this day.
Yes! I place I worked for in the mid late 90's made a short run inhouse version of this type of adapter for testing pci network cards. Hotswap (with a toggle) PCI goodness.
@@escgoogle3865 same - mid-late 90's, but we had a bunch of these exact cards for prototyping and validation work. Simply because they were orders of magnitude cheaper than Innotec or MuTech!
The purple Sonnet thing is a G3 upgrade for the powerMac 6100/7100/8100. Those came with PPC601 chips, up to 110MHz IIRC. I had a 8100 back in the day, and would have given an arm and a leg to have an upgrade like that. Those NuBus powerMacs were weird to upgrade; the upgrade plugged into the video card slot, and then you'd plug back the video card into the upgrade card. That's why it has 2 slots. Unfortunately I don't have that 8100 anymore.
The Sonnet Crescendo 250/512k is a 250 MHz G3 processor upgrade that plugs into the cache slot on several different Macintosh models, and some clones. It'll work in the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 81xx, several Performa models in 61xx series, 6360, 6400 and 6500 (as well as their Power Macintosh counterparts), WGS 6150, 8150 and 9150, as well as Power Computing 100, 120 and some others. The Newer Technology Maxpowr Pro 250/125 is a 250 MHz G3 upgrade for the Power Macintosh 7300-7600 and the 8500-9600. Both of those upgrade boards are highly sought after and are worth hundreds of dollars a piece, if they still work. But even if they don't work, they'd still go for quite a bit to someone who can fix them.
As others have said, those are Multibus I cards. This was likely some form of industrial computer; the cards would plug into a card frame/chassis, similar to the old S-100 systems. These were referred to as SBCs, as compared to older designs that had a CPU board, a memory board, and such. The original IBM-PC motherboard would have been considered an SBC at the time it was released.
Are the initial few boards from an Intel MDS System. We used to use those back in the late 70's and through to the 90s for 8085 and 8086 development. Can't say I remember exactly what the boards and Backplane looked like. But many of the boards had a backplane and ribbon cables off the front edge similar to those you showed
That board was used in Intel iRMX boxes. I remember these from a company that used them as system controllers for data acquisition systems. Definitely Multibus systems. I just called them Intel White Boxes, as opposed to Blue Box development systems for micro controller based systems.
I own an Intel System 86/310 which has had a very interesting life modified as an iAPX 432 clone system from a company called High Integrity Systems. Sitting right next to me..!
@@absalomdraconis I have been (very slowly) piecing together a TH-cam video about this system, if only so that others can learn something about it and where it came from. I've even 3D modelled about 80% of the internals. Even have a faithful recreation model of the System 432/600. One day I'll get back into that project. That's why the machine is sitting next to me!
If only that Intel 056A written on the board was of any help.... "The iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/056A Random Access Memory (RAM) Boards provide a dynamic memory storage capacity of 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, and '256k bytes, respectively, for use with all Intel iSBC HO/86 Series Single Board Computers and Intel SO/86 Series Microcomputer Systems. These RAM boards interface directly with the bus master via the Multibus interface and differ only in memory capacity and memory array configuration. This manual provides a general introduction, prepara- tions for use, principles of operation, and service requirements for each of the configurations of the RAM board. The iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/056A RAM boards are designed to allow quick, easy, and inexpensive expansion of RAM storage facilities within an Intel Multibus-compatible System. On-board refresh circuitry initiates periodic RAM refresh cycles to maintain the integrity of the RAM data. An optional auxiliary bus connector may provide battery back- up power for the RAM and the refresh circuits. The RAM boards are direct replacement products for the iSBC 016/032/064 RAM Boards. Figure 1-1 shows a typical example of the iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/ 056A RAM Boards. "
The SBC multibus was used in industrial process control systems, the first company i worked for back in the mid-late 90's made industrial control systems with 8086 and the 80486/overdrive cpu cards. The CPU cards are stand alone, they have everything on them (local ram, IO etc) however they have a bus so that you can plug multiple CPU cards, shared memory cards, IO cards etc etc and access them. The reason the roms are 'missing' is because these contained the operating system that was made by the company for the client. The 'bodging' might not be repair bodging as the cards would need to be configured which sometimes you wire wrapped from configuration pins and sometimes they were soldered.
The Sonnet card is for the first generation PPC Mac, the 6100 was a pizza box format machine with a Processor Direct Slot that could take an adapter to get a Nubus slot. The Newer card is for a PCI Powermac. It might be a G3 processor or maybe a 604. I'm surprised it didn't specify which.
Wrt the GPIB interface: GPIB is a bus originally made by HP. It was/is often used on test equipment like bench multimeters, oscilloscopes etc. The devices can be daisy chained.
My brother worked for NCR around that computer era, and he had a van fully of dead boards. All their customers needed to keep running, so it was pull the dead board and relace with new. There was also a price list for a twin 8" Winchester HDD at $8K - lol -.
I don't have any INTEL multi bus boards but I do have several MC68000 and MC68020 boards and (i believe) a 5 slot backplane. I converted an old test stand from the multi bus system to a PC At/386 with a custom interface board. It took about 6-8 months to design/build and rewrite the test software. About a year after that my company was bought and the multi bus systems were tossed. I have them in a storage unit waiting to be revived. Maybe one day.
As others have said, Multibus I cards (the ones with the same edge connectors). I would guess they were all in house prototyping boards by the "scrap intel" stamped on the backs and the crazy amount of bodge wires. Very cool find, I would make a cool wall display out of them.
8255? I know that one well. It's not a UART. It's a two or three parallel ports, depending on how you configure them as input only, output only, bidirectional or bit mode.
Winchester disk drive. That takes me back. Back in high school in the late 80s our computer room was BBC micros with a Winchester hard drive running on a BBC master as a server. It was quite a big noisy box.
The tiny board with 488 on it would be a GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus or IEEE-488) interface. It's a relatively simple interface to implement, having exactly 16 data/control lines. It has an 8-bit bi-directional data bus and 8 control lines. The control lines are used to change the data bus between data mode and command mode, and also for flow control along the data bus. I'd presume that one of the two large chips is used as an output latch and one is used for input, while the two slightly smaller chips contain the control programming. There looks to be a resistor array in there, so I expect the output was open-collector with the resistors providing pull-ups to make the data lines "float" high when not being controlled. Functionally, they could probably have gotten away with just using a single 16-bit interface chip, but logically it was probably easier to implement the GPIB protocol by having separate chips for input and output. The reason I'm so knowledgeable about GPIB is because I had to "home brew" a GPIB interface to allow a kit-built computer to "talk" to an old Commodore 2031 disk drive which used the GPIB for its interface. I used two 8-bit output latches and two 8-bit gates for input, with a few "glue" logic chips around the interface chips to decode the I/O address and handle Chip Enable. The (presumably) RAM chips probably have their response time in nanoseconds printed on them as the last three digits, so 002 means a 2 nanosecond response time, which is pretty fast considering when they were made.
33:30 The extender boards were a thing you saw for amateur (ham) radio repair, starting with the Yaesu FT-101 series in the 1970s; Yaesu designed their transceiver to have plug-in boards so you could test them either on the bench or plug the extenders to work on it with the rig plugged in, or just stick a new board in. This stuff is still being done by FT-101 users to this day. (The FT-101 is a Japanese shortwave ham radio which is mostly transistorized, except for the transmit output, which is amplified by tubes. It's a very analog machine.)
As others have said - it is a Multibus card. The Multibus was Intel's competitor to the Motorola Exorbus (which later became VME). It was first invented and used in their Blue Box development systems. The boards that have sockets on the bottom are likely emulator boards. The Intel Blue boxes provided emulators for the different Intel CPUs. The sockets on the bottom would be how the emulator was plugged into the board-under-development. This would let you load code and interactively debug your board and software together. The blue box would supply you with keyboard/monitor and disk storage for supporting your debug. I believe these were called "Isis" boxes - maybe for In-System-Support 0r something like that.
The board with the ZIF sockets was probably an EPROM programmer, and could program OTP 80xx-series microcontrollers like the 8049/51 based on the fact that those are 40 pin ZIF sockets; if it did only EPROMs, it’d only need a 28 pin socket. Just my $0.02, though.
Hey, look at that. My home town of Sylmar (North East corner of the San Fernando Valley) got mentioned without any references to wild fires or earthquakes!
The PCI Electronic Extender (PCIEE) is a device designed to enhance the process of testing and developing PCI Bus products. With the PCIEE , you can disconnect the power and bus signals from the top connector and safely insert or remove tested cards with the PC power turned on. This not only saves time, but also protects the components of the PC from damage that results from constant Power On - Power Off cycling.
My thought on the board with SCRAP on it is that when I worked for DEC, sometimes things would get marked as SCRAP as a way for them to be taken off the books so that someone could take it home with them. There'd be nothing wrong with it, or maybe some minor thing to justify marking it as scrap.
That ink used to stamp SCRAP on those boards may be conductive! A lot of stamp pad inks back in the day had carbon black as a major component. Be sure you clean that up before firing up. The 8255 is a programmable peripheral interface. It provides three 8-bit parallel I/O ports that can be configured in a variety of ways by sending appropriate code to the chip at startup. (A very long time ago, I built an I/O board that used an 8255 to interface to real-world loads that were controlled by a SInclair ZX-81 that controlled the I/O by use of POKE and PEEK commands from Sinclair BASIC. The board was described in Mike Lord's "The Explorer's Guide to the ZX-81 and Timex-Sinclair 1000". I still have a copy of the book, having recently re-bought it used.)
I sure hope you are able to put together that multibus computer, would make a nice video series. Looks like all you are really missing is the cage, backplane, and a psu.
Blue boards at Intel means Beta prototype pass. Red is used for Alpha pass, and green is either a production spec prototype or a production part. Something escaped the lab there-Intel has a very strict internal system to keep track of and destroy prototypes.
I can confirm that the IWM chip from a Mac SE will work in a //c. I have a //c that I've had since my dad bought it from a classified ad in the 90s, and it never read disks. A year ago i bought an IWM (plus ROMs) someone pulled from an SE, and my //c is back in action!
21:55 - I had a box of those square shaped boards - they all got chucked when I moved house though so I never got exploring them - they did appear to have a lot of gold on them though....
At 10 definitely a CPU card. PIO, Interrupt controller and cache on board. Did not see a DMA controller but a number of ROM slots and yes looks like the 8087 socket. Neat Shtuff.
GPIB interface is an IEEE488 HP test equipment physical standard protocol communication board. The IEEE488 standard was ALSO used in CBM Pet 2001 and others as a printer and disk drive controller interface.
The board at 15:10 is probably for a terminal. GPIB is used in, among other things, oscilloscopes and test equipment. Maybe most of this first pile was from some sort of manual + automated testing workstation.
I have a G3 card in my 7600/120 Mac Power PC, that looks similar to that board. However, the upgrade card I have, is made by Sonnet, who made a lot of upgrade stuff for the Power PCs. I bought the the 7600 as a used computer, and even after doing several upgrades on the machine, I just wasn't happy with the performance. So, now it sits in my basement, unloved. They also sold a G4 upgrade, but it was expensive, and I was so underwhelmed by the performance, that I never bothered with any further upgrades. For awhile, I was thinking about putting Linux on it.
Those little blue connectors on those Multibus cards look like iSBX. Fun fact: ASDG made an iSBX adapter on a Z-2 card they called the Twin-X. They made drivers for RS-232 and GPIB modules but anything fancier than that you'd have to get made yourself. Also DMA wasn't supported.
The tag on the small board with words like "Epoxy" and "Touch up" probably refers to the epoxy insulating coating over the traces. The silk screening process could be slightly misaligned and the operator or auditor didn't catch it. So inspectors would hold the boards at a steep near 90 degree angle looking for traces shining too brightly ie: uncoated. Then touch them up with paintbrushes and epoxy. They would also look for coating where it didn't belong and use a spinning nylon tool to sort of "dremel" it off. The material would remove the coating but not the trace. For a time I worked on raw circuit board layers for an IBM commercial subcontractor, and at another plant on completed boards. I worked as an inspector, a silk screener, and an auditor. That was in the early to mid 80's.
8x4 1k array for first card, 32kb total. Was mighty spendy when new back then, scrap today. Surprisingly the gold scrappers didnt pull the chips. The second one is the system bios boot card. Floppy card was for a big 8 incher, the potentiometer controls the motor speed of it.
Card #1 is an Intel Multibus card. Multibus was an Intel standard (like S100) that was used in their development systems. Scrap, card was probably salvaged from Intel by an employee. I used to buy scrap boards from DEC when I worked there. (cost me 10 cents on the dollar of what DEC paid for them). The 8089 could be used as a programmable DMA controller, card might have been a disk interface for Multibus? Looks like all those cards could have come out of an Intellec development system That floppy disk controller card could have been part of a two board unit, the two boards connected at the top by a jumper card or cable. That 8086 board IS the main cpu board from an Intellec system. The 8259 is the interrupt controller, 8253 is a timer, the 8251 is a serial uart chip, 8255 parallel IO (printer interface maybe). Scrapped boards might not have been defective, just too far out of revision to keep in stock or bodge up to the current circuit schematic. That defective board with the leds looks like it might have been part of a chip programmer.
The Intel stuff looks like customer returns to me. The failure description, the test card, an orange arrow pointing to one of the pins of an IC maybe indicating something of interest for a failure analysis. Looks super interesting!
what an interesting episode about so much unknown hardware. Would be a challenge to get these single board computers running.. Keep on with these excellent videos
You can pretty easily pinpoint the short on the card that has the +5V shorted to GND marking using a milliohmmeter. I have a bench multimeter that can reach there. Handy for finding shorts.
.... this page as an on-line reference to the Multibus circuit boards. Intel originally developed these boards in 1976 for use in the Intel MDS-800 Microcomputer Developement System (picture). However Intel quickly found that many people were buying the MDS boards in order to build these own computers and computer controlled equipment, so they started selling them as OEM boards. The demand was great enough that Intel soon developed a complete line of Multibus products. In addition, they released the Multibus specification and it was eventually standardized as IEEE-796 Bus Specification. Within a few years there were over 200 companies building over 500 different Multibus products. In addition to the boards that fit the Multibus specification, I am also including the iSBX and iLBX boards since they are commonly found as daughterboards on the Multibus boards. 3MI have created this page as an on-line reference to the Multibus circuit boards. Intel originally developed these boards in 1976 for use in the Intel MDS-800 Microcomputer Developement System (picture). However Intel quickly found that many people were buying the MDS boards in order to build these own computers and computer controlled equipment, so they started selling them as OEM boards. The demand was great enough that Intel soon developed a complete line of Multibus products. In addition, they released the Multibus specification and it was eventually standardized as IEEE-796 Bus Specification. Within a few years there were over 200 companies building over 500 different Multibus products. In addition to the boards that fit the Multibus specification, I am also including the iSBX and iLBX boards since they are commonly found as daughterboards on the Multibus boards.
I own a System 86/310 that was modified by another company called High Integrity Systems. They swapped out the Intel iSBC card with their own 3 board solution which appears to actually be a clone of Intels own iAPX 432 system cards! I've been gathering as much detail as I can and even made 3D models of some of the components and cards and such. The cards Adrian has were an option for the Intel System 86/300 series, so what he has is quite a rarity indeed. All he would need is a small 4 slot Multibus I backplane and a few ROMs and things and he could at least attempt a power on with the iSBC and connect a terminal. The Winchester controllers both require external cards for data conversion etc. For example the iSBC 215 and 218 were used for hard drive and floppy drive. The 218 actually plugs into the 215 as a daughterboard and connects directly from the 50 pin IDC to a typical 34 pin Shugart floppy drive. For a hard drive to be connected to a 215, it seemingly only supports MFM drives (I built a MFM hard drive emulator Adrian showed in one of his previous videos) and the data connector goes through an Intel Data Separator board. I would suggest these cards were removed from the RA pile at Intel. The markings 'SCRAP' and paint and tags point me in that direction.
I'm completely amazed those 64kx1 DRAMS are not in sockets. Those are Multibus cards. Industrial and scientific automation from 40+ years ago. More: at 12 minutes, that floppy controller is built out of Intel 2 bit, Bit Slice logic. AMD did 4 bit wide bit slices in 1975, but Intel did 2 bit slices in 1974. The Intel D3002 and family are similar in concept to the AMD2901. The 40 pin chip on that card is an Intel D3001 Microprogram Control Unit which I think may be similar to the AM2909/AM2911. 18 minute range: GPIB = General Purpose Interface Bus interface. IEEE-488 is the standard number.
Look at Linus Tech Tips’ tour of the intel labs! These could be dev boards they would have used for initial testing. Way overboard for consumer use but would help them with debugging and development of new hardware.
If you look at the CPU board those connectors are probably the console and maybe printer interfaces. The UARTs and 1488/1489s were really common for RS232 level shifting back then. Edit: I watched the CPU section again and it actually looks like there may have been more 1488/89 pairs in those open sockets. I used to work on an Intel system reminiscent of this. The US Army had a bunch of them out at Ft. Hauchucha in Arizona. They ran a multiuser MS DOS. This was nearly 40 years ago and I was 16 at the time so my memory is failing.
R.I.P. JDR Microdevices, I looked them up and they're "Temporarily Closed", IDK for how long but they might have closed up permanently during the pandemic. I used to have some of their catalogs, there was a lot of cool stuff in those.
I might be wrong (it's been a very long time), but those Intel-branded cards with the dual edge connectors look similar to the Intel MDS-80 or MDS-800 development systems. Intel sold these for firmware development with in-circuit emulators for 808x family processors and PROM burners for embedded development. I briefly used one back in the late late 1970s.
The Asante card could potentially be used with the breakout board of a different PDS network card. I personally have a Novell card on my SE, that I use with the breakout board of a DaynaPORT SE/30 card. Pinout seems to be the same, it might be the same case for other boards. In any case, the pins should be AUI signals, so you could also rig up a DB15 port on the back for a transceiver, or internally wire up a transceiver.
Those fist cards you showed are very similar in form to what I know as load boards, which Vector Electronics Company actually sells. (Yes Vector Electronics Company is still around) The similarity being the edge connections and the little triangular parts on the corners that flip out
If the state of these boards is anything like the state of our dev boards we chucked out at Philips after using them then good luck getting them to do anything! Our boards often ended up broken in ways that we (as the designers of the board) couldn't work out. They may even have early silicon revisions on too - whilst this sounds interesting, in reality it translates to 'doesn't work as expected'...
(to be clear I'm talking about prototype boards for Philips products - set top boxes, TVs, DVD drives etc...). Alternatively you may get lucky - perhaps these belonged to the software department so will be fairly unscathed!
I don't specifically recognize the two Power PC processor boards but I had a mac from this family and while I loved the machine speed on the CPU on the motherboard was quickly dated as the CPU was soldered on boards like this essentially came a long seized the bus and allowed you to upgrade the machine. If I remember correctly it also used the original CPU as some form of co-processor though my memory is hazy about all of this.
First card is most likely 'Multibus 1', used in some Intel development systems. The card in the picture was Multibus 2. MC1488/1489 are RS232 buffers, so it may be that small edge connector was for a serial port. My guess is that the boards are from and early Intel Intellec MDS development system. I am with your guess as to the first non multibus board being a terminal.
Pretty sure if you head to a local e-waste place, you could get all the boards you wanted, and then some (if they allow you to take stuff - some places are oddly paranoid / cheap and won't let you take anything)
The Sonnet for the most part go's into the cash slot to by-pass the old cpu. The New Tech card I have no clue, Might want to give Mac84 a holler, he would my best guess on a full run-down.
I believe there are MULTIBUS addon modules for the CPU boards that add.... Some sort of functionality... One that I can't remember right off the bat....
Looks like some i Saw on usagi Electric Centurion Series Here on youtube. An old busstandard as Well. Would be cool to see at least one card up and running, controlling something again After 42 years.
Adrian, you can find scrap Intel stuff over at Surplus Gizmos, if you're looking for more junk like this. But something tells me you already know about that place, hah! You have no idea how much stuff we'd scrap over at Intel, you'd drool at our recycle bins.
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Those first few boards are Intel Multibus cards. The reason they don't look like the picture you saw in the Wikipedia article is because the cards you have are Multibus I (IEEE 796) whereas the card pictured on Wikipedia is a Multibus II (IEEE-1296) card. (The Multibus II spec was released in the late 80s, so long after those boards you have were made.)
Multibus was used in a lot of industrial systems . It was also used in a lot of 80s and early 90s UNIX systems from HP, Sun, and SGI. The Sun-1 and Sun-2, for example, were 68000-based systems that used Multibus I in order to take advantage of peripheral cards that had been designed for Intel Multibus systems.
aha, later in the video you show an Intel iSBC web page that lists them as "MULTIBUS I Single Board Computers"
The Wikipedia article also mentioned that 8089 IO processor being used in the "Intel System 86" -- so I Googled that, and found a "System 86/330A Overview Manual" (this one published in June 1982) which shows a desktop chassis with multiple cards in it, about the right size. The contents lists a CPU board, a 256K memory board, a Winchester controller board, and a floppy disk controller board. Sounds like a match to me!
and...wikiped... is known for its inaccuracies...
I have about a dozen of these cards and 2 of the Intel low profile rack mount chassis for them (model SBC 655). I have a couple of 8080A CPU cards (80/20), a couple 8085A CPU cards (80/05), a couple of memory and I/O expansion cards, and a couple of DAC cards (by DATEL). These were used in the USGS DWWSSN seismic stations that were deployed around the world in the '80s. I will be firing these up for our next vintage computer club meet in Albuquerque.
This unlocked a deep memory for me. My parents had a computer with the multibus boards for their business back in the 80s. Haven't seen those dual connectors since I was a kid.
10:35 The 9.8304 MHz crystal is used for the serial I/O.
Divide that frequency nine times by two and you get 19,200 Hz.
In the vicinity we find an Intel 8251 USART which supports up to 19.2K Baud for asynchronous transfers.
Doesn't sound like a coincidence, does it? ;-)
The crystal isn't connected directly to it, though. It needs to be fed by a baud rate generator.
Above the 8251 we discover both the MC1488 and 1489 chips so we know that we are dealing with RS-232 hardware here (next to the connector...).
That card has serial and parallel! It's an Intel iSBC 30 board (or similar) which given enough support hardware can be made to attempt a POST with the built in routines and monitor.
For the Intel Multibus cards, one person who might be able to get them working would be David of the "Usagi Electric" TH-cam channel. He was at the most recent VCF East with his Centurion system.
Yeah ... "just show 'em to usagi, I bet he'll know a thing or three about them" was my first thought when adrian showed those cards in the video
He was also on stage with Adrian at VCF East...
Nowadays, we understand an SBC as a truly complete system on a single board like a Raspberry Pie for example.
But back then an SBC meant that there was a "complete set of components" on a single board with which you could work:
CPU, "BIOS" ROM, RAM and at least a serial port to connect a terminal to it.
With a bus connector like the Intel Multibus shown here you could obviously expand your SBC into a more fully fledged system.
There were many different systems like this around back then.
Yes and that is literally how the Intel manual for the board puts it.
@@bzuidgeest I'm assuming that's why it's in quotes!
@@kaitlyn__L I don't have the Intel manuals the other poster mentioned. It simply is what it is (or rather "was" at the time).
The quotes were meant for emphasis as "complete" is only an opinion and the (EP)ROM chip on a CPU board wasn't always called a BIOS but often a monitor, for example.
GPIB (IEE488) is a bus for controlling the lab devices like multimeters, power sources, etc.
And aren't the Commodore PET disk drives on a GPIB? I believe that the Osborne 1 also has GPIB for, what, a printer? Maybe I'm wrong about that.
That is what it became, in its early days it was an actual computer bus like SCSI but it was quickly outdated, being an 8 bit bus. The origin was HPIB but that was patented so the industry circumvented that by creating the GPIB "copy".
@@goranekstrom708 almost: HP were fully cooperative with it becoming an industry standard, you just can't use company names in standard names. Same reason SASI became SCSI, even though Shugart again were part of the effort.
Those sonnet crescendo cards are great, hope that makes it to someone who can use it. That NewerTech card is a mac upgrade too. Pretty universal one for mid 90s machines that use that type of CPU card.
Yeah. That one looks like it's for a PowerMac 6500 or similar, I think.
The Intel board is a Multibus board for industrial computer- iSBC-056 256k RAM board. A GPIB Board would be IEEE-488 related, like that used on the PET
Re: Top Down Camera ... I can see a hot spot reflecting off the circuit board. It might not look obvious but it's like taking a flash picture at a mirror. The camera is trying to compensate for a light source in the picture. Try putting a mirror on your table and see if the camera can see a light source.
It's Intel Multubus. The gold paint was probably to indicate a "golden" board to be used in testing.
Yep. BitSavers has the spec document for IEEE-796 -- the dual-connector bit is shown in chapter 4, page 3
I'm thinking it is from a vintage 007 film. . . .
literally golden, what I though, it was tested and someone painted it golden to know its golden, makes sense
I love board archeology from that era. So many different products from tons of vendors, trying to create the next big thing.
As an owner of an Intel Multibus system that barely functions due to faulty parts, I am extremely envious of your newfound collection of Multibus cards..!! :D
Edit: Adrian, if you do not want to keep those Multibus cards, I will happily pay for them and shipping costs to Australia!
If you get them, you got to make videos to show them off!
That's the original version of the isbc-215 that requires a external adapter for st-406 drives rather than the generic 215g variant that supports them directly. The documentation for it is at bitsavers.
26:13 - This is a Sonnet Crescendo G3, which is an upgrade processor for PowerPC 601-based Power Macs. It mentions 3 models on the card specifically: PowerMac 7100, PowerMac 8100, PowerMac 6100AV. It is known compatible with the 7100 and 8100, it is incompatible with the 6100AV and incompatible with DOS-compatible machines, however; it will work in any other 601-based PowerMac with a Processor Direct Slot, or "PDS." It has a maximum frequency of 400MHz, 64k of level 1 cache, 1mb of level 2 cache, and supports MacOS 8.5-9.0. Retail was $700.
27:18 - This is a Newer Technology MAXpowr G3 250, which is an upgrade processor for PowerPC 604(e)-based Power Macs. It is compatible with the PowerMac 7300-7600, 8500-9600, as well as some PowerComputing and Umax Macintosh clones. It replaces any stock daughtercard, and plugs into said daughtercard slot. It has a maximum frequency of 250MHz (hence the 250 name), 64k of level 1 cache, 512k of level 2 cache, and supports MacOS 8.0-9.0. Retail was $550.
These are really cool and a good find!
I have the same 250MHz Newer Technology MAXPowr G3 card in my “Kansas” 9600, very nice card. I also have XLR8 MACh Carrier G3 card somewhere that I haven’t tried yet. I believe it is a 400MHz G3.
So that AZ-COM card there is something rather special indeed; that's a PCI bus analysis and hot-plug validation board. The risers segment can be configured to mimic cPCI passive extenders for cPCI analysis as well. The missing SW2 would be the bus swap in/out as I recall; that toggle at the rear is probably for switching between 5V and 3.3V. I actually did a very similar modification.
The Twin Industries 5EXTM is a 32-bit board specifically for backprobe and testing on 4-layer PCBs; they still make several versions of it to this day.
Yes! I place I worked for in the mid late 90's made a short run inhouse version of this type of adapter for testing pci network cards. Hotswap (with a toggle) PCI goodness.
@@escgoogle3865 same - mid-late 90's, but we had a bunch of these exact cards for prototyping and validation work. Simply because they were orders of magnitude cheaper than Innotec or MuTech!
The purple Sonnet thing is a G3 upgrade for the powerMac 6100/7100/8100. Those came with PPC601 chips, up to 110MHz IIRC. I had a 8100 back in the day, and would have given an arm and a leg to have an upgrade like that. Those NuBus powerMacs were weird to upgrade; the upgrade plugged into the video card slot, and then you'd plug back the video card into the upgrade card. That's why it has 2 slots. Unfortunately I don't have that 8100 anymore.
The Sonnet Crescendo 250/512k is a 250 MHz G3 processor upgrade that plugs into the cache slot on several different Macintosh models, and some clones. It'll work in the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 81xx, several Performa models in 61xx series, 6360, 6400 and 6500 (as well as their Power Macintosh counterparts), WGS 6150, 8150 and 9150, as well as Power Computing 100, 120 and some others.
The Newer Technology Maxpowr Pro 250/125 is a 250 MHz G3 upgrade for the Power Macintosh 7300-7600 and the 8500-9600.
Both of those upgrade boards are highly sought after and are worth hundreds of dollars a piece, if they still work. But even if they don't work, they'd still go for quite a bit to someone who can fix them.
25:20, the blue connector is a Hypertac connector, very expensive and qualified for avionics and military systems.
I KNEW IT! The gold paint looks like the systems I saw applying to a modernization job for the FAA.
As others have said, those are Multibus I cards. This was likely some form of industrial computer; the cards would plug into a card frame/chassis, similar to the old S-100 systems. These were referred to as SBCs, as compared to older designs that had a CPU board, a memory board, and such. The original IBM-PC motherboard would have been considered an SBC at the time it was released.
Are the initial few boards from an Intel MDS System. We used to use those back in the late 70's and through to the 90s for 8085 and 8086 development. Can't say I remember exactly what the boards and Backplane looked like. But many of the boards had a backplane and ribbon cables off the front edge similar to those you showed
That board was used in Intel iRMX boxes. I remember these from a company that used them as system controllers for data acquisition systems. Definitely Multibus systems. I just called them Intel White Boxes, as opposed to Blue Box development systems for micro controller based systems.
I own an Intel System 86/310 which has had a very interesting life modified as an iAPX 432 clone system from a company called High Integrity Systems. Sitting right next to me..!
@@orinokonx01 : iAPX 432 is many things, but indeed, "uninteresting" will never be one.
@@absalomdraconis I have been (very slowly) piecing together a TH-cam video about this system, if only so that others can learn something about it and where it came from. I've even 3D modelled about 80% of the internals. Even have a faithful recreation model of the System 432/600.
One day I'll get back into that project. That's why the machine is sitting next to me!
This is what I was going to say.
Interesting boards, especially the Mac SE for me. I was a test engineer on two chips on that board.
If only that Intel 056A written on the board was of any help.... "The iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/056A Random
Access Memory (RAM) Boards provide a dynamic
memory storage capacity of 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, and
'256k bytes, respectively, for use with all Intel iSBC
HO/86 Series Single Board Computers and Intel
SO/86 Series Microcomputer Systems. These RAM
boards interface directly with the bus master via the
Multibus interface and differ only in memory
capacity and memory array configuration. This
manual provides a general introduction, prepara-
tions for use, principles of operation, and service
requirements for each of the configurations of the
RAM board.
The iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/056A RAM boards
are designed to allow quick, easy, and inexpensive
expansion of RAM storage facilities within an Intel
Multibus-compatible System. On-board refresh
circuitry initiates periodic RAM refresh cycles to
maintain the integrity of the RAM data. An optional
auxiliary bus connector may provide battery back-
up power for the RAM and the refresh circuits. The
RAM boards are direct replacement products for the
iSBC 016/032/064 RAM Boards. Figure 1-1 shows a
typical example of the iSBC 016A/032A/064A/028A/
056A RAM Boards. "
The SBC multibus was used in industrial process control systems, the first company i worked for back in the mid-late 90's made industrial control systems with 8086 and the 80486/overdrive cpu cards. The CPU cards are stand alone, they have everything on them (local ram, IO etc) however they have a bus so that you can plug multiple CPU cards, shared memory cards, IO cards etc etc and access them.
The reason the roms are 'missing' is because these contained the operating system that was made by the company for the client.
The 'bodging' might not be repair bodging as the cards would need to be configured which sometimes you wire wrapped from configuration pins and sometimes they were soldered.
Yep, they were in the CNC machines I worked on in the mid 80s. The processor used was a Zilog Z8000. Machines were Excellon drills and routers
The Sonnet card is for the first generation PPC Mac, the 6100 was a pizza box format machine with a Processor Direct Slot that could take an adapter to get a Nubus slot.
The Newer card is for a PCI Powermac. It might be a G3 processor or maybe a 604. I'm surprised it didn't specify which.
It’s a 250MHz G3, I have the exact card in my 9600
Wrt the GPIB interface: GPIB is a bus originally made by HP. It was/is often used on test equipment like bench multimeters, oscilloscopes etc. The devices can be daisy chained.
My brother worked for NCR around that computer era, and he had a van fully of dead boards. All their customers needed to keep running, so it was pull the dead board and relace with new. There was also a price list for a twin 8" Winchester HDD at $8K - lol -.
30:35 - Those PCI prototyping extender cards look SUPER COOL!
I don't have any INTEL multi bus boards but I do have several MC68000 and MC68020 boards and (i believe) a 5 slot backplane. I converted an old test stand from the multi bus system to a PC At/386 with a custom interface board. It took about 6-8 months to design/build and rewrite the test software. About a year after that my company was bought and the multi bus systems were tossed. I have them in a storage unit waiting to be revived. Maybe one day.
As others have said, Multibus I cards (the ones with the same edge connectors). I would guess they were all in house prototyping boards by the "scrap intel" stamped on the backs and the crazy amount of bodge wires. Very cool find, I would make a cool wall display out of them.
8255? I know that one well. It's not a UART. It's a two or three parallel ports, depending on how you configure them as input only, output only, bidirectional or bit mode.
First board is a 256k RAM board for MultiBus systems.
Winchester disk drive. That takes me back. Back in high school in the late 80s our computer room was BBC micros with a Winchester hard drive running on a BBC master as a server. It was quite a big noisy box.
The tiny board with 488 on it would be a GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus or IEEE-488) interface. It's a relatively simple interface to implement, having exactly 16 data/control lines. It has an 8-bit bi-directional data bus and 8 control lines. The control lines are used to change the data bus between data mode and command mode, and also for flow control along the data bus.
I'd presume that one of the two large chips is used as an output latch and one is used for input, while the two slightly smaller chips contain the control programming. There looks to be a resistor array in there, so I expect the output was open-collector with the resistors providing pull-ups to make the data lines "float" high when not being controlled.
Functionally, they could probably have gotten away with just using a single 16-bit interface chip, but logically it was probably easier to implement the GPIB protocol by having separate chips for input and output.
The reason I'm so knowledgeable about GPIB is because I had to "home brew" a GPIB interface to allow a kit-built computer to "talk" to an old Commodore 2031 disk drive which used the GPIB for its interface. I used two 8-bit output latches and two 8-bit gates for input, with a few "glue" logic chips around the interface chips to decode the I/O address and handle Chip Enable.
The (presumably) RAM chips probably have their response time in nanoseconds printed on them as the last three digits, so 002 means a 2 nanosecond response time, which is pretty fast considering when they were made.
33:30 The extender boards were a thing you saw for amateur (ham) radio repair, starting with the Yaesu FT-101 series in the 1970s; Yaesu designed their transceiver to have plug-in boards so you could test them either on the bench or plug the extenders to work on it with the rig plugged in, or just stick a new board in. This stuff is still being done by FT-101 users to this day.
(The FT-101 is a Japanese shortwave ham radio which is mostly transistorized, except for the transmit output, which is amplified by tubes. It's a very analog machine.)
As others have said - it is a Multibus card. The Multibus was Intel's competitor to the Motorola Exorbus (which later became VME). It was first invented and used in their Blue Box development systems. The boards that have sockets on the bottom are likely emulator boards. The Intel Blue boxes provided emulators for the different Intel CPUs. The sockets on the bottom would be how the emulator was plugged into the board-under-development. This would let you load code and interactively debug your board and software together. The blue box would supply you with keyboard/monitor and disk storage for supporting your debug. I believe these were called "Isis" boxes - maybe for In-System-Support 0r something like that.
I usually use Google Search by Photo to identify boards. And with those first few Intel boards look like: Intel iAPX 432. For sure the 2nd board.
No Intel iAPX 432 here, but close! Intel used some of these cards in their iAPX 432 computers (See Intel System 432/600 series).
yes the great iAPX 432 of which most people do not know of it's rich history or how Intel put a 32 bit IBM mainframe on a single board computer
The board with the ZIF sockets was probably an EPROM programmer, and could program OTP 80xx-series microcontrollers like the 8049/51 based on the fact that those are 40 pin ZIF sockets; if it did only EPROMs, it’d only need a 28 pin socket. Just my $0.02, though.
The 8202 is a DRAM controller from back in the day before DRAM did it's own refresh. Not a chip I have used (I used to use the 74S407 I think).
Hey, look at that. My home town of Sylmar (North East corner of the San Fernando Valley) got mentioned without any references to wild fires or earthquakes!
The PCI Electronic Extender (PCIEE) is a device designed to enhance the process of testing and developing PCI Bus products. With the PCIEE , you can disconnect the power and bus signals from the top connector and safely insert or remove tested cards with the PC power turned on. This not only saves time, but also protects the components of the PC from damage that results from constant Power On - Power Off cycling.
My thought on the board with SCRAP on it is that when I worked for DEC, sometimes things would get marked as SCRAP as a way for them to be taken off the books so that someone could take it home with them. There'd be nothing wrong with it, or maybe some minor thing to justify marking it as scrap.
Right - it was generally marked SCRAP so it couldn't be resold, not because it was non-functional.
That ink used to stamp SCRAP on those boards may be conductive! A lot of stamp pad inks back in the day had carbon black as a major component. Be sure you clean that up before firing up.
The 8255 is a programmable peripheral interface. It provides three 8-bit parallel I/O ports that can be configured in a variety of ways by sending appropriate code to the chip at startup.
(A very long time ago, I built an I/O board that used an 8255 to interface to real-world loads that were controlled by a SInclair ZX-81 that controlled the I/O by use of POKE and PEEK commands from Sinclair BASIC. The board was described in Mike Lord's "The Explorer's Guide to the ZX-81 and Timex-Sinclair 1000". I still have a copy of the book, having recently re-bought it used.)
I sure hope you are able to put together that multibus computer, would make a nice video series.
Looks like all you are really missing is the cage, backplane, and a psu.
Looks like a task for usagi
...and a bunch of ROMs...
@@martinwhitaker5096 Easy. All you need is something simple running 8086 only code.
Blue boards at Intel means Beta prototype pass. Red is used for Alpha pass, and green is either a production spec prototype or a production part. Something escaped the lab there-Intel has a very strict internal system to keep track of and destroy prototypes.
I can confirm that the IWM chip from a Mac SE will work in a //c. I have a //c that I've had since my dad bought it from a classified ad in the 90s, and it never read disks. A year ago i bought an IWM (plus ROMs) someone pulled from an SE, and my //c is back in action!
21:55 - I had a box of those square shaped boards - they all got chucked when I moved house though so I never got exploring them - they did appear to have a lot of gold on them though....
At 10 definitely a CPU card. PIO, Interrupt controller and cache on board. Did not see a DMA controller but a number of ROM slots and yes looks like the 8087 socket. Neat Shtuff.
The purple heatsinks are from Sonnet. You could send those Macintosh partd to Sean from Action Retro if you have nothing to do with them.
GPIB interface is an IEEE488 HP test equipment physical standard protocol communication board.
The IEEE488 standard was ALSO used in CBM Pet 2001 and others as a printer and disk drive controller interface.
Then stripped down as the Commodore serial bus
Very interesting stuff. I'd love to see some troubleshooting on that board with the short to GND!
The board at 15:10 is probably for a terminal.
GPIB is used in, among other things, oscilloscopes and test equipment.
Maybe most of this first pile was from some sort of manual + automated testing workstation.
I have a G3 card in my 7600/120 Mac Power PC, that looks similar to that board. However, the upgrade card I have, is made by Sonnet, who made a lot of upgrade stuff for the Power PCs. I bought the the 7600 as a used computer, and even after doing several upgrades on the machine, I just wasn't happy with the performance. So, now it sits in my basement, unloved. They also sold a G4 upgrade, but it was expensive, and I was so underwhelmed by the performance, that I never bothered with any further upgrades. For awhile, I was thinking about putting Linux on it.
Those little blue connectors on those Multibus cards look like iSBX. Fun fact: ASDG made an iSBX adapter on a Z-2 card they called the Twin-X. They made drivers for RS-232 and GPIB modules but anything fancier than that you'd have to get made yourself. Also DMA wasn't supported.
The tag on the small board with words like "Epoxy" and "Touch up" probably refers to the epoxy insulating coating over the traces.
The silk screening process could be slightly misaligned and the operator or auditor didn't catch it. So inspectors would hold the boards at a steep near 90 degree angle looking for traces shining too brightly ie: uncoated. Then touch them up with paintbrushes and epoxy. They would also look for coating where it didn't belong and use a spinning nylon tool to sort of "dremel" it off. The material would remove the coating but not the trace.
For a time I worked on raw circuit board layers for an IBM commercial subcontractor, and at another plant on completed boards. I worked as an inspector, a silk screener, and an auditor. That was in the early to mid 80's.
8x4 1k array for first card, 32kb total. Was mighty spendy when new back then, scrap today. Surprisingly the gold scrappers didnt pull the chips. The second one is the system bios boot card. Floppy card was for a big 8 incher, the potentiometer controls the motor speed of it.
Those were the days
Card #1 is an Intel Multibus card. Multibus was an Intel standard (like S100) that was used in their development systems. Scrap, card was probably salvaged from Intel by an employee. I used to buy scrap boards from DEC when I worked there. (cost me 10 cents on the dollar of what DEC paid for them).
The 8089 could be used as a programmable DMA controller, card might have been a disk interface for Multibus?
Looks like all those cards could have come out of an Intellec development system That floppy disk controller card could have been part of a two board unit, the two boards connected at the top by a jumper card or cable. That 8086 board IS the main cpu board from an Intellec system. The 8259 is the interrupt controller, 8253 is a timer, the 8251 is a serial uart chip, 8255 parallel IO (printer interface maybe).
Scrapped boards might not have been defective, just too far out of revision to keep in stock or bodge up to the current circuit schematic.
That defective board with the leds looks like it might have been part of a chip programmer.
The Intel stuff looks like customer returns to me. The failure description, the test card, an orange arrow pointing to one of the pins of an IC maybe indicating something of interest for a failure analysis.
Looks super interesting!
Ha! I just used my JDR Microdevices screwdriver yesterday. Free gift when you ordered XT motherboard clones from them.
If you read the EPROMs from the 2nd Intel board, that might give you an answer to what these are.
what an interesting episode about so much unknown hardware. Would be a challenge to get these single board computers running.. Keep on with these excellent videos
You can pretty easily pinpoint the short on the card that has the +5V shorted to GND marking using a milliohmmeter. I have a bench multimeter that can reach there. Handy for finding shorts.
Those first boards look like the type of vertical RAM/processor used in old PBX's.
i was going to say those intel boards are from a mini-computer
.... this page as an on-line reference to the Multibus circuit boards. Intel originally developed these boards in 1976 for use in the Intel MDS-800 Microcomputer Developement System (picture). However Intel quickly found that many people were buying the MDS boards in order to build these own computers and computer controlled equipment, so they started selling them as OEM boards. The demand was great enough that Intel soon developed a complete line of Multibus products. In addition, they released the Multibus specification and it was eventually standardized as IEEE-796 Bus Specification. Within a few years there were over 200 companies building over 500 different Multibus products.
In addition to the boards that fit the Multibus specification, I am also including the iSBX and iLBX boards since they are commonly found as daughterboards on the Multibus boards.
3MI have created this page as an on-line reference to the Multibus circuit boards. Intel originally developed these boards in 1976 for use in the Intel MDS-800 Microcomputer Developement System (picture). However Intel quickly found that many people were buying the MDS boards in order to build these own computers and computer controlled equipment, so they started selling them as OEM boards. The demand was great enough that Intel soon developed a complete line of Multibus products. In addition, they released the Multibus specification and it was eventually standardized as IEEE-796 Bus Specification. Within a few years there were over 200 companies building over 500 different Multibus products.
In addition to the boards that fit the Multibus specification, I am also including the iSBX and iLBX boards since they are commonly found as daughterboards on the Multibus boards.
I own a System 86/310 that was modified by another company called High Integrity Systems. They swapped out the Intel iSBC card with their own 3 board solution which appears to actually be a clone of Intels own iAPX 432 system cards!
I've been gathering as much detail as I can and even made 3D models of some of the components and cards and such. The cards Adrian has were an option for the Intel System 86/300 series, so what he has is quite a rarity indeed.
All he would need is a small 4 slot Multibus I backplane and a few ROMs and things and he could at least attempt a power on with the iSBC and connect a terminal. The Winchester controllers both require external cards for data conversion etc. For example the iSBC 215 and 218 were used for hard drive and floppy drive. The 218 actually plugs into the 215 as a daughterboard and connects directly from the 50 pin IDC to a typical 34 pin Shugart floppy drive. For a hard drive to be connected to a 215, it seemingly only supports MFM drives (I built a MFM hard drive emulator Adrian showed in one of his previous videos) and the data connector goes through an Intel Data Separator board.
I would suggest these cards were removed from the RA pile at Intel. The markings 'SCRAP' and paint and tags point me in that direction.
I'm completely amazed those 64kx1 DRAMS are not in sockets. Those are Multibus cards. Industrial and scientific automation from 40+ years ago.
More: at 12 minutes, that floppy controller is built out of Intel 2 bit, Bit Slice logic. AMD did 4 bit wide bit slices in 1975, but Intel did 2 bit slices in 1974. The Intel D3002 and family are similar in concept to the AMD2901. The 40 pin chip on that card is an Intel D3001 Microprogram Control Unit which I think may be similar to the AM2909/AM2911.
18 minute range: GPIB = General Purpose Interface Bus interface. IEEE-488 is the standard number.
Look at Linus Tech Tips’ tour of the intel labs! These could be dev boards they would have used for initial testing. Way overboard for consumer use but would help them with debugging and development of new hardware.
Pretty good source of TTL logic and high quality sockets tou have there.
GPIB is a communications port that was used with a lot of HP equipment.
Love your t shirt. I had two relatives that worked for Tektronix.
That magic purple heatsink screams "Sonnet"
If you look at the CPU board those connectors are probably the console and maybe printer interfaces. The UARTs and 1488/1489s were really common for RS232 level shifting back then.
Edit: I watched the CPU section again and it actually looks like there may have been more 1488/89 pairs in those open sockets.
I used to work on an Intel system reminiscent of this. The US Army had a bunch of them out at Ft. Hauchucha in Arizona. They ran a multiuser MS DOS.
This was nearly 40 years ago and I was 16 at the time so my memory is failing.
R.I.P. JDR Microdevices, I looked them up and they're "Temporarily Closed", IDK for how long but they might have closed up permanently during the pandemic. I used to have some of their catalogs, there was a lot of cool stuff in those.
you should contact usagi electric and see if he wants any and all multibus cards, or q bus cards.....
I might be wrong (it's been a very long time), but those Intel-branded cards with the dual edge connectors look similar to the Intel MDS-80 or MDS-800 development systems. Intel sold these for firmware development with in-circuit emulators for 808x family processors and PROM burners for embedded development. I briefly used one back in the late late 1970s.
The Asante card could potentially be used with the breakout board of a different PDS network card. I personally have a Novell card on my SE, that I use with the breakout board of a DaynaPORT SE/30 card. Pinout seems to be the same, it might be the same case for other boards. In any case, the pins should be AUI signals, so you could also rig up a DB15 port on the back for a transceiver, or internally wire up a transceiver.
Those fist cards you showed are very similar in form to what I know as load boards, which Vector Electronics Company actually sells. (Yes Vector Electronics Company is still around) The similarity being the edge connections and the little triangular parts on the corners that flip out
19:30 You can barely make out the white printing under the sockets: one would be for a 8086 or 8088 and the other for a 8087
IIRC, the Sonnet Crescendo were G3 cache slot upgrades,mostly for the likes of the PowerMac 6500.
Could ask Usagi Electric, he will probably know what system boards are from, they look similar to what he has shown is on his channel.
pwa should mean printed wiring assembly, its another term for pcb
If the state of these boards is anything like the state of our dev boards we chucked out at Philips after using them then good luck getting them to do anything!
Our boards often ended up broken in ways that we (as the designers of the board) couldn't work out.
They may even have early silicon revisions on too - whilst this sounds interesting, in reality it translates to 'doesn't work as expected'...
(to be clear I'm talking about prototype boards for Philips products - set top boxes, TVs, DVD drives etc...).
Alternatively you may get lucky - perhaps these belonged to the software department so will be fairly unscathed!
I don't specifically recognize the two Power PC processor boards but I had a mac from this family and while I loved the machine speed on the CPU on the motherboard was quickly dated as the CPU was soldered on boards like this essentially came a long seized the bus and allowed you to upgrade the machine. If I remember correctly it also used the original CPU as some form of co-processor though my memory is hazy about all of this.
The 2nd board: iSBC 215A1/iSBC 215B WINCHESTER DISK CONTROLLER
Crazy Ken would be ecstatic for those mac parts.
(Doug Demuro Voice) *THIS* Adrian Black impersonator is superb.
I dismantled many cards like that in my younger years, they were from a telephone exchange.
Got to love people who helpfully write stuff in permanent marker.
First card is most likely 'Multibus 1', used in some Intel development systems. The card in the picture was Multibus 2.
MC1488/1489 are RS232 buffers, so it may be that small edge connector was for a serial port.
My guess is that the boards are from and early Intel Intellec MDS development system.
I am with your guess as to the first non multibus board being a terminal.
I always wanted to make a table/bar with circuit boards covered in epoxy. Looking back I wish I had kept all of my bad boards/cards.
Pretty sure if you head to a local e-waste place, you could get all the boards you wanted, and then some (if they allow you to take stuff - some places are oddly paranoid / cheap and won't let you take anything)
Been a while since I've seen RAM chips in ceramic packages!
The Sonnet for the most part go's into the cash slot to by-pass the old cpu. The New Tech card I have no clue, Might want to give Mac84 a holler, he would my best guess on a full run-down.
I believe there are MULTIBUS addon modules for the CPU boards that add.... Some sort of functionality... One that I can't remember right off the bat....
GPIB was a bus protocol that was really popular in manufacturing and heavy industry, pretty sure it was a HP thing.
HP Gas Chromatographs interface to GPIB cards, for instance.
HP-IB became GPIB which became the IEEE-488 like used on the Commodore PET!
Sonnet Crescendo is an upgrade card that have better CPU and more cache.
This card disables in some way the internal CPU
Looks like some i Saw on usagi Electric Centurion Series Here on youtube. An old busstandard as Well.
Would be cool to see at least one card up and running, controlling something again After 42 years.
5:45, screaming at the screen "SCROLL ON!!! THERE'S ANOTHER PICTURE THAT LOOKS _EXACTLY_ LIKE THE ONES YOU ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING AT!!!!!"
Seem like cards Usagi Electronics would have
The PCI riser cards look like they take turn a later 3.3V-only slot into an older 5V-only slot.
Adrian, you can find scrap Intel stuff over at Surplus Gizmos, if you're looking for more junk like this. But something tells me you already know about that place, hah! You have no idea how much stuff we'd scrap over at Intel, you'd drool at our recycle bins.