210-8396?! I didn't believe I'd ever see one of those again! They were a challenging board to repair, I saw quite a few of these during the mid 1980's. It was the main board for an external hard disk enclosure with one or two MFM hard drives fitted, the hard drives could be up to 85Mb each. This unit was used on the whole Wang range including 2200, OIS and VP. Wang used the parallel port to interconnect these hard drives and also their 2270 external tape drive to the host computer. Common faults... there's a 74LS30, I saw it on the video, that would fail. The 8237 DMA controller manufactured by AMD could cause data corruption as some of them had a manufacturing defect, there was a replacement campaign of the 8237 chip at one time. Nice video.
Ain't it nice when someone posts a nice thorough video asking for help identifying a mistery item and lo and behold, somebody actually recognizes it? 😄
@@merseyviking Not entirely sure because this is an external unit like the C64's drives. There's a cable needed for data that plugs into a host machine. I didn't check which models are compatible and I'm unsure which model Usagi has.
Re. the delay line - these were common in ST506 hard disk controllers, used for write precompensation. This adjusted the write timing based on the position of the head, to compensate for the effects of differing surface speeds between the inner and outermost tracks. The large RAM is probably simply buffering for data being read/written from/to the disk to offload work from the main system CPU. It could even be that this board was in charge of maintaining file structures, sector allocation etc.
Given the fact that it also has an 8272 IBM compatible floppy controller -- could it be an MS-DOS compatibility card that reads and writes PC floppies and hard disks?
Colleges and universities were targeted by Wang and bought heavily into their word processor systems. They may be a source to target for Wang stuff as they often put stuff in storage rather then throw things away.
C3 7A 01 at the beginning is a jump to address 017A. Reset would jump to 0000, which is presumably the start of this EPROM. The code at 0066h is the NMI handler. Non maskable interrupt code. That address is fixed for the Z80. You can run that EPROM through DASMX to see a disassembly of it. My guess is that the pcb is a disk controller for a larger system. Maybe the 64K is used as a cache for a hard disk. The 8237 DMA controller would read data from the controller chip and place it in the DRAM. The delay line chip is probably used to generate RAS and CAS timing for the DRAMs. That connector looks like a centronics parallel printer port. But maybe it's for communicating with the rest of the system, as you suggested.
2275 Disk Drive\Hard Drive. Search for "Wang vintage computer model 2200MVP and 2200 hard disc and 5.25 floppy Drive", there is a picture of a circuit board marked 8396.
Yeah, looks like a winner, seems to have been a separate chassis with the drives and that board in it which connect back to the host, the connector layout on the back of the 8396 board lines up with this card.
The black "paint" you see on the component side of the board is actually an inner layer. This is a multilayer board with at least a power or ground layer buried (or maybe both). Wang made a PC, but it was an AT class machine (I used one at work). I think the Word Processors were Z-80 based.
@@BrendaEM A multilayer board like that has traces and planes (power and ground) sandwiched inside the fiberglas reinforced resin substrate. Inner layers are usually coated in copper oxide to enhance the bonding. Usual procedure was to put the ground plane just under the components to minimize cross-talk among signals. Solder mask was originally thought only necessary to prevent solder bridging during wave solder assembly and thus was not applied to the component side. We later learned that solder mask had value on both sides of the board.
Wang originally made a PCXT class machine than 8086 processor. It was a chassis with an interface bus that all the boards, including the CPU board, would fit into. The boards were extremely large and, while it could run MS-DOS, it was not IBM PC compatible. IBM PC compatibility could be achieved with a large and expensive compatibility board that went next to the CPU board. They were not well supported by anyone and the only software available was VisiCalc and Wang’s own word processing.
Hey dude. Just wanted to let you know I love the style of your videos. You are one of the few TH-camrs I watch as soon as I can, and I never tab out. Thanks and keep up the good work.
well, my comment got deleted for whatever reason… it's the controller board for a Wang 2275 drive enclosure. they came with either 1 HD & 1 Floppy, or 2 HDs, all 5¼". the 2275 belonged to the Wang 2200 PCS series mini-computer. I I guess I won't link the 2275's product sheet and manual, since I don't know if that's what got my last comment killed.
It could be almost anything. Wang tried a whole lot of different technologies, from stand alone word processors to shared logic minicomputers, to almost an IBM compatible mainframe system. In that time there were no firm rules so there were a lot of weird hybrid machines of all sorts. Wang’s profit margins were huge, so they could afford to over-engineer a disk controller. Steve Wozniak did a disk controller with 7 cheap chips and a PROM but he had very different constraints.
@@graealex Yep, I count 70 logic packages on the Shugart controller! Copies of it that I've seen made by other companies, they're usually like 11x17 inch boards and cost like $3000 each! Woz did the incredible.
5-1/4" floppies used just a single 34 pin cable... Winchester hard drives on the other hand used two cables, the 34 pin floppy type cable and a second smaller cable. Exactly like what's on that card. I'm betting what you have is something akin to a very early disk array controller or SAN unit. Edit: the more I think on it the more convinced I am that's actually the drive control board from a Wang mainframe system. That big Centronics connector almost certainly plugs into the backplane.
The 36 way Amphenol connector was used for parallel printer ports before IBM used the DB25. Designed at Centronics, a subsidiary of Wang Laboratories, By An Wang. (et al.)
As you say, using a Z80 on a disk controller board is not unheard of. The bigger iron used complex strategies: Disk caching, predictive read-ahead, optimizing the request queue for efficient head travel, etc. etc. Not something your average chip can do and not something you want to burden the main processor with.
@@polluks2 True, but I think that has more to do with the way disks were implemented in the Commodore line. Tacked onto their proprietary external bus instead of connected to the main bus.
Would have liked to see some close-ups of both the blue connector pairs. The black connector is a Centronics parallel printer connector. My suspicion is that's a print spooler board. Jobs are spooled to the floppy drive, and it dequeues and prints them. The printer might be a dot matrix, band, or chain printer. It's not going to be a laser printer, for sure.
@@RossComputerGuy "spooled to the floppy drive" -- MFM and floppy chips. Also, DMA is not strictly for storage devices. You can use DMA for memory memory, memory -> I/O port, and I/O port -> memory.
J.C. Wren - I think you might be right. It's hard to find any info online for Wang Computers stuff, even decent photos of the various boards. It doesn't make sense that it would have quite so much RAM on, unless it was loading up quite a bit of data. And the lack of other connectors makes me think it's from a word processor, where the rest of the system can access this board via a terminal board and monitor / keyboard. I doubt the Centronics port would be for an external floppy drive, because in 1986-87, it was prime-time for the 36-pin Centronics port for parallel printers. Around that time, it almost makes no sense that it would be for anything else. hehe So yeah, possibly a floppy controller with buffer RAM to hold a few pages of text or graphics. (64KB could store a LOT of text, so I'm thinking this would be capable of loading graphics as well.)
Give it about two days, though, and I'm sure somebody on Discord will have a full emulator running for it. lol They will likely have disassembled and commented half the Z80 code from that main ROM, too.
Is this prehaps the Wang WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection)? It's mentioned on their Wikipedia page as an add-on board for the Wang PC with a Z80 and 64k of ram. It's mentioned as being 2 large boards, so prehaps this is only half of it. From what it sounds like, it was a product to allow the Wang PC to connect to the OIS and VS products.
This card could be a multi disk controller card. The DMA, 2 counters, Z80, MFM controller, and floppy controller gives it away to me. Z80 is for bus access and routes control between MFM and floppy. The DMA chip is then used to transfer onto the bus.
@@cameronwetzel6227 No, and I'm on the discord server. Some manuals were posted and it is in fact for this exact card. There's even a 3 drive controller variant. I've read through a bit and it actually uses all the memory for buffering.
So how does it connect to the Wangwriter's backplane bus then? Through that 36 pin connector on the outside? Does that even expose the machine's bus at all?
What you have is an IEEE488/hpib bus disk controller, IEEE488 needs quite a bit to make it talk etc. For example, have a look at early Commodore disk drives, like the 8250, they have as much 'computer' in them as the Commodore computer itself, even much later C64 drives have a 6502 micro board, with lots of IC's IEEE488 protocol is very high level, as in you don't generally ask for sectors and tracks etc, but ask for a directory list, or 'here, go store this file', with the drive taking care of the disks directory & where to actually put that data on the disk. So basically the drive IS the disk operating system (DOS)
Exactly. The 1541 disk drives have their own 6502 CPU, 2K of RAM, 16K of ROM and talks over an IEC serial bus to a Commodore 64/128/VIC-20 etc. And that looks like this card is fairly similar in nature.
The connector on the back is a SCSI bus connector. That board is a disk cabinet control board. It was used for floppy and hard drives as well. The reason it has a Z80 and RAM is because Wang, like most mini computer makers, built IO Processors. That is a single board computer, but dedicated to disk processing.
@@joemonktx I worked at Wang on SCSI during its earliest development. The first connectors were Centronics type 50 pin connectors. The signals were all on one side of the connector and the ground lead of the twisted pair were on the other side of the connector. The next generation used a smaller, more dense 50 pin connector, then wide SCSI (16 bit) used a 68 pin version of the same dense connector. There was a non-standard 25 pin (DB25) version of SCSI that Apple used, but no one else. There is a great article on wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_connector. I still use SCSI for some devices!
@@reilleysinventions4155 I worked at National FSI in Dallas on Wang hardware (We outsold Wang's own office in the banking industry, and had the second VS80 in Texas). In addition, I worked at El Paso Natural Gas on RSF on the VS300 (14 VS300s all coupled together on RSF).
Others have pointed it out but the 36-pin connector is typically a Centronics parallel port, although it's strange to see it with screws instead of the metal clips that are more common.
That connector reminds me of proprietary SCSI connectors. That'd basically explain the single board computer aspect as well (as most SCSI was implemented as computercomputer rather than the devicecomputer architecture we think of now)
I managed a Wang VS minicomputer system for the US Air Force from 1989 to 1992. It used six 288 MB disc pack drives. The user terminals consisted of dumb terminals (Wang workstations) and 8086, 286 and 386 PCs. The original Wang 8086 PC was a beast.
those dumb terminals were quite possibly smarter than you think. although Wang did have a basic serial port dumb terminal most of them were run on 1 or 2 Z80s and had 16 to 64k of ram. The 64K ones could run up to 4 seperate sessions at a time, and they were block mode screen transfers to the computer, 2K at a time after having validated the editable fields for char or numeric values, white space and required entries (all done in the terminal).
The connectors look like typical MFM HDD connectors tho. Who knows, maybe this is a raid controller since the 2 Control connectors are....2 different ones instead of just one. And then the memory.
Interesting bit of trivia-- Dr. Wang is the guy that encouraged Shugart to build the first 5.25-inch floppy. Shugart was going to put an AC motor in it but Dr. Wang immediately vetoed that-- the AC motor would have required a phasing capacitor half the size of the disk drive and the AC magnetic field would have screwed up the CRT display. Very smart man.
So the question was already answered in the comments, but speaking of your live thoughts through out the video this board kinda reminds me Atari LDW Super 2000 floppy drive. It had Z80 CPU, 2 kB of RAM and dedicated floppy disk controller chip. Used Atari serial I/O bus to connect to the 8-bit machine. There were mods that you could upgrade memory to 64K and run CP/M inside it, then used terminal emulator on Atari to connect to OS running inside floppy drive.
The dark background is likely power and ground planes on internal layers of the board. Are the top traces actually bare solder coated traces, or might they have a clear solder mask on them? Anyway, I'd be more keen to try powering it up, locate power rails from IC's to the big brown plug (probably), and then try to see if there are any video generation type chips on there to try locating a video signal from, etc...
Given the set of chips it looks like this is an intelligent floppy + harddisk controller. Part of the 64K memory will be dedicated to data transfer cache accessible by DMA. The main Z80 processor will be occupied with housekeeping and managing the Centronix connector data protocol. The CTC timers will also use the DMA controller to generate the timing signals for the MFM harddisk drive.
In case you never found this out: Are there still any Wang catalog listings online for Wang in 1986? That's the date on many of those chips; 8632. Looking carefully at those catalogs, and comparing device sizes, would give you a massive clue about what it is/was.
I have a weird OMTI SCSI and MFM Dual HDD Controller board. Its like 2 book-sized PCB's who god knows what. It has Euro connectors. I just kept it because it looks kinda cool and I had ISA/Zorro II OMTI HDD Controllers before! Your board looks unjustifiably large for 2 Winchester drives....1986....Reminds me of the Atari Megafile PCB's inside the case. Also huge for just converting MFM HDD's to a DMA Bus.
SCSI-1 controller for two hard drives, ST506 or similar. The Z80 and memory are for dealing with SCSI, MFM for the hard drives, and DMA to connect the two. You can tell it's SCSI and not IBM parallel because of the three sets of terminating resistors right next to the connector. It has two different clocks because SCSI-1 runs at 10 MHz, but MFM drives can't go that fast. I suspect that the red 6-pin connector in the middle is power for the whole board, + and - 5V and a couple of grounds? The drives of the era had a separate 4-pin Molex power connector with +5, -5, +12 and ground if I remember correctly. The drive data (narrow) and control (wide) cables should just be straight through ribbons. Good luck!
There is a Listing on eBay right now for a Wang P-S3-3 that has that same connector on the back. This could be the motherboard for a Wang PC compatible. That 10 87 looking date code coup pt this as a late model
That PCB looks familiar, I am pretty sure it is from a Wang OIS (Office Information System). Really not much more than a multi-user word processing system. There would be other PCB's in the system as well for multi terminals (they did not use RS232 but coax) as well. Unfortunately I dumped all my service manuals that covers the Wang OIS, DP2200 and VS systems about 3 years ago.
With the 36 pin connector I would have assumed early SCSI connection, with the 4 different types of drive connectors, it may be the main board for an early Platter hard drive ( think old, cake dome covered when not inserted platters ).
Looking at the rear connector, I was reminded of Centronics parallel-port connectors. It is called a micro-ribbon 36-pin female connector, likely Centronics given the number of pins. I suggest to read about Centronics Data Computer Corporation which began as a division of Wang Laboratories. Also of interest, the parallel port and micro ribbon connector articles on the Wikipedia. Strangely, in 1987 Centronics sold its printer business and used the proceeds to buy Ekco Housewares. You may have some kitchen utensils made by Ekco in your home at this very moment (I do, as does my mom). I see lots of interesting theories in the comments. As you alluded to, the board is surely more than an ordinary disk controller, even though it says 5 1/4 disk control. To be clear I am not saying the connector is necessarily for a printer. From my reading, Wang had a whole bunch of surplus micro-ribbon connectors left over from an early calculator design and so they appeared in various places.
I'm going to leap in at 5:54 before watching the rest and take a stab that this could be more than a floppy controller board, it's a filesystem board? That is the host(s) throw high level file IO at it and it handles the nitty gritty. Sort of like Commodore's floppy drives but in my experience of it talking about the setup of certain ASMP unix based systems.
This seems like a "PC-compatibility" card! Will DMA cables attach to any of those blue connectors? That might be how the two computers communicate with each other. That weird port on the edge reminds me a little of a parallel port.
At least the beard space and time continuum seems to be restoring itself. I agree with the initial conclusion it must be some kind of SBC. Find a 5v rail and just power it up. You would expect at least one of the chips to give you serial. Either find and trace it or just probe the mystery port with the scope or logic analyzer. It has to have in and output somewhere. Edit: there are some comments saying it's just a disk controller for some Wang systems drive. I'd say power and probe it.
I bet a closer look thru the ROM will sort it out if someone in the comments doesn't already know. It would be easy to suss out what pins are power and the format of the resulatant data to interface with the thing if you really wanted to.
Phoned Wang Labs back in the late 80's to inquire about a two-tone encoder we came across while replacing some county-wide systems. We decoded the codes we knew we needed, but no one could produce the whole matrix or expected format for all of it. After providing every number on and in the unit, along with dates etc off the eprom we were told that it didn't appear anywhere in catalogs or notes and that "Dr Wang" was know to put side-projects together and send them out without any further documentation !?!!!.
Nice hopping to the bench. LOL. First off, It would look great in a frame on the wall. The 4Mhz crystal will be for the Z80 CPU, the 10Mhz might be for the Floppy controller/CTC chips. (If my memory serves me right the Z80 CTC chips use a seperate clock to the Z80 CPU) I think it is a single board computer. I've seen that black connector, (8:10), on the back before, I just can't bring it to mind. Apart from that, I'm no help at all. :)
The black colour is actually the ground plain. The board will be 3 to 5 layers and one of those will be what you can see as a black. But if you pick a spot where there is no tracers you can scratch through the fibreglass to it and see the copper.
This could be an early SCSI SCSI MFM disk drive controller board from a 2 drive HD enclosure. Typically would have had 2x 300MB Disk units plugged into it. Reminds me of the Sun disk Unit I used to use that was connected to old Sun 68020 work stations. Didn't Wang produce an early Unix system at all?
Was thinking that looks like an old "female" parallel, not so rare maybe. Maybe it wasn't, they often has side clips IIRC but it sure looked like one at first glance.
Back in the late 80s, our machine at work was a Sanyo Icon (which sorta blurred the lines between mini, micro and mainframe)... as well as it's main 68020 processor board, it also had another (I think) 68000 board which was the "disk/cache processor" that had it's own RAM, mostly for disk cache.... well I wonder if this is a similar thing for Z80 land, Wang systems???? The DMA might be to feed data from the cache over to the main processors RAM????? The "not serial" connector looks a bit like a Centronics parallel printer port.
My first reaction is this is a board of of Wang's mini-computer/multi-user system that would live in a computer room. However, the lack of connectors is bothering me. I would have expected a card edge connector so it could be put into a card cage. At this point, I am thinking it is more like a single board computer. It looks like it mounts to a baseplate instead of a card cage. That one connector on the card end looks like a classic Centronics parallel port before IBM established the DB25 standard.
I think that is is an external hard or floppy disk box for 2 MFM drives. I would expect that your weird looking connector is something like a SCSI interface. It looks similar to the CBM PET external dual floppy station. That used an entire 6502 system to drive two micropolis floppy drives. The CBM floppy also had a large RAM bank. Considering where Wang vwas used it must have been a storage device for one of Wang's Minicomputers. Maybe someone among your subscribers has a pin out for that device. The Z80 was Very popular among designers for peripheriials. I worked at Nixdorf Computers in the late 1980s and it was used like a micro controller for sublemevtary tasks. The octopus 8818 Telephone exchange used the Z80 massively parallel. Every subscriber card had one. So, you finding the Z80 on a disk controller is not that unusual. Good hunting!
The lack of a bus connector on this is very confusing, The form factor suggests something out of a Wang Professional Computer. They were 8086/80286 based but did have a separate Winchester controller board. I'm wondering if this could have come out of a late model OIS 40/50/60. I wasn't working much with Wang after 1986 and didn't get any time on the "baby OIS" boxen.
Assuming that the board is late 86 early 87 the form factor seems to be full AT. Board purpose seems to be disk board or terminal. Perhaps a prototype?
DMA controller means OS. It would be interesting to see if that parallel port is directly connected to the CPU BUS. I bet is a single board computer with a specific software for word processing in conjunction of a terminal trough the parallel port. OS and data disks might require two different drives. Might also be used in industrial applications and CNC machines as old PDPs.
I remember in the late 1980s, there was a big push to connect (at the time) 'modern' computers to 9-track-tape drives, primarily for extracting and post-processing seismic data, which was held on tens of thousands of tape reels. I also remember the controllers for those things being massively complex, with multiple (twisted-pair) ribbon cables coming from them. I wonder if that's what that thing is?
The blue connectors are putting me a lot more in mind of MFM or RLL Hard drive connectors than floppy drive connectors. It looks like roughly contemporary Wang micros were labeling them Winchesters, 🤷🏻♂. Maybe for the 2200 series? We'd have a better idea, if every picture of every port on every 2200 including the one currently on ebay, wasn't the WORST PICTURE EVER.
Yes - it's for the 2200 - there's a diagram for the 8396 on page 2 here, that's pretty clearly a match www.wang2200.org/docs/peripheral/2275_DiskStorageUnit_InternalMemos.pdf
That points us to the Wang Model 2275 Disk Peripheral, which appears to be the box that the 8396 sits in. www.wang2200.org/docs/datasheet/2275_DiskPeripheral_DataSheet.715-0045.7-84.pdf
As far as the why? I don't think it is an IEEE 488 bus device, but it's probably very much on the same principles (cf Commodore 1541), and it's probably implementing the hard disk controller (which in the MFM case included a lot of smarts that would go on the drive in later standards) using discrete logic.
From the "Centronics" wiki page: "Centronics began as a division of Wang Laboratories". My guess for the connector on the back is also that it might be a Centronics parallel printer poort. Maybe checkout this wiki page for clues.
Commodore did similar things on their Floppy drives (on a lower cost). They were basically computer. Maybe this floppy drive controller was able to communicate with multiple computer so that multiple computer can share this floppy drive. Maybe it was even able to copy floppies by it self without needing a extra computer all the time. Commodore units where able to do this.
Just looked on eBay and saw another WANG 8396 very similar to yours and is described as follows. Vintage Wang 8396 - r1m1 Wang Circuit Mother Board System Computer. It's probably not a full computer motherboard but probably a board from a Wang Terminal, usually comprising a monitor, motherboard (in a single unit), and keyboard.That is my guess anyway.
Seems like it is a floppy controller designed to sit on some bigger computers I/O channel and blast data through it with DMA. Maybe even has some read/write cache?
it looks to me like a terminal emulator with the ability to save to floppy(wang propriatary floppy), maybe the connector on the back was meant to have various adapters... there may have been a 2nd board that plugged into a backplane of a bigger computer(ibm maybe), can see screw holes on the left side and in the center where standoffs could go to mount it, right where it would need to go to plug in the ribbon cables. so what i think this does is make wang propriatary stuff work on ibm hardware...
Looks like a stand alone hard drive controller for a system that doesnt have the ability to be expanded. Looks like it talks to the main system thru the centronics connnector in the back. What would be cool is figureing out how it talks thru that connector and seeing if you can get it to start sending out data thru the port.
This looks a lot like a hard disk controller that replaces the regular FDC card, or it ties into the floppy cable chain. Do the cables match up with a regular XT-style MFM interface? It should take a Seagate ST506 or ST412 hard disk that you can take from any regular 5150.
"A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of the hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. "
Wang was into corporate/campus computing networks at the time. They were a major competitor to where I worked which was TRW. Ethernet and such didn’t exist at that scale yet. So networking was done via broad band cable systems. Basically you had 6 MHz Tv channels used for networking. Z80s where the highest performing processor at the time for doing networking/terminal server activities. Not sure this helps with your question but take it for what it’s worth. $0.02!
Correct. The proprietary broadband communication used between all Wang devices was called the "928 link." That name was given to the protocol by Dr. Wang because no one could come up with an appropriate name. So Dr. Wang turned to the design team and said, "Well, today is September 28. That's 9/28, so we'll call it the 928 link."
The Commodore disk drives were literally a separate computer attached to some some drives. I am wondering if its the same thing. The connector on the end is probably a interface cable for connection to something like a Wang writer.
From Wikipedia: "The original Wang PC was released in April 1982 to counter the IBM PC, which had been released the previous August and which had gained wide acceptance in the market for which Wang traditionally positioned the OIS system. It was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor, a faster CPU than the IBM PC's 8088.[49] A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of the hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. The original PC-VS hardware was using the 928 terminal emulator board, the WLOC boards were used in the subsequent 80286 machines." Alternatively, to me, that board looks like a full workstation main board, which I wonder if it was the guts of a workstation Wang response to systems of the time like DisplayWriter or Xerox 820. The Wang 2200 series was similar in functionality but used the Wang 2200 chip. (The 2200VS looks like really interesting machine. Could program in COBOL, RPG and Assembler using the 360/370 instruction set.) Is there a Wang product catalog around from that time, about 1983 to 1986 (the year on the chip, not the 1986 from the data dump which may have been an update)?
That strange 36 pin terminal seems like a centronics printer port (parallel port) to me. But it can be another kind of parallel port. Besides the single board computer I can also imagine a smart HDD/FDD autonomous controller, with support for multiple disk simultaneous accesses and a RAM cache to speed up disk access. Such a system would use a parallel port to transfer data to/from the main processing system. Much like what happens with SCSI disk systems.
My first guess was CP/M card for some other system. But by '86 CP/M was largely obsolete. And as others have pointed out, it is probably a hard disk controller with a decent read/write buffer. And the back connector sure looks like a Centronics interface use for parallel communications, most well knows are, of course, printers.
I remember 36 pin ports being parallel printer ports. I think you do have a single board microcomputer with floppy disk controller, serial monitor port and printer port. Just a guess but it looks like it.
Commodore disk drives such as the 1541 used a MOS 6502 running at 1MHz and with 2k of RAM. They were more or less computers in their own right. But the RAM on your board does seem excessive.
I did wonder if it was part of the 2200, but I see someone has identified it, although looking at 2200 images with google it isn't what I remember, we had a wang machine linked to a cmd drive, with a box with individual cards and a terminal attached, anyway it's brought back memories albeit vague.
That certainly looks very like/ is a full computer not just a disk controller.. Definitely.. Maybe. What is missing for that are the normal interface ports like keyboard or display. Could be intended to operate through terminals but that doesn't make much sense for 1986 either. Could be a second board that handles the user interface stuff - but that starts to make it look like part of a larger multiprocessor system. A real mystery.
I am a former Wang employee who created and manages a Wang Alumni group on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to include you - we read like a Who''s Who in computing and boast 2700+ members.
It might not have been designed as an SBC in the direct sense, but with such capable resources I'm sure it could be 'persuaded' to do that duty with new ROMs. :-)
Is it a Board from an 80’s stand up arcade game?? Centipede or Donkey Kong . The IC in frame at time index 3:10 is a 1983 Logic Gate. My guess is still atacase game or The WOPR from the 1983 movie War Games. 😂. Never know. Thanks for the cool videos
it might be the board you bought of ebay? Vintage Wang. 8396 - r1m1 Circuit Mother Board System Computer.Untested, pulled out of a computer that powered on. No other info offered.
210-8396?! I didn't believe I'd ever see one of those again! They were a challenging board to repair, I saw quite a few of these during the mid 1980's. It was the main board for an external hard disk enclosure with one or two MFM hard drives fitted, the hard drives could be up to 85Mb each. This unit was used on the whole Wang range including 2200, OIS and VP. Wang used the parallel port to interconnect these hard drives and also their 2270 external tape drive to the host computer. Common faults... there's a 74LS30, I saw it on the video, that would fail. The 8237 DMA controller manufactured by AMD could cause data corruption as some of them had a manufacturing defect, there was a replacement campaign of the 8237 chip at one time. Nice video.
So is it compatible in any way with the Wang Writer?
Ain't it nice when someone posts a nice thorough video asking for help identifying a mistery item and lo and behold, somebody actually recognizes it? 😄
So, I love this little community right here, that's amazing right. Random ebay board and someone knows exactly what it is. :)
Denis is right, last night on the discord server manuals were posted and it lines up with this exact card.
@@merseyviking Not entirely sure because this is an external unit like the C64's drives. There's a cable needed for data that plugs into a host machine. I didn't check which models are compatible and I'm unsure which model Usagi has.
Re. the delay line - these were common in ST506 hard disk controllers, used for write precompensation. This adjusted the write timing based on the position of the head, to compensate for the effects of differing surface speeds between the inner and outermost tracks.
The large RAM is probably simply buffering for data being read/written from/to the disk to offload work from the main system CPU. It could even be that this board was in charge of maintaining file structures, sector allocation etc.
Given the fact that it also has an 8272 IBM compatible floppy controller -- could it be an MS-DOS compatibility card that reads and writes PC floppies and hard disks?
Found it Mike - www.wang2200.org/docs/peripheral/2275_DiskPeripheralMaintenance.741-1345-A.10-85.pdf
Sometimes I wonder if the chips internally say "YAY ELECTRICITY!" when powered on for the first time in years :D
...then blow up in a puff of magic smoke
There's nothing like a good electron party!! 🥳
The chips would have a WANG of a time ! WANG bang thank you ma’am ! 😂
@@hafiz468 The bang only happens when Magic White Smoke ® is released!
@@RWBHere 💨 😂
Colleges and universities were targeted by Wang and bought heavily into their word processor systems. They may be a source to target for Wang stuff as they often put stuff in storage rather then throw things away.
C3 7A 01 at the beginning is a jump to address 017A. Reset would jump to 0000, which is presumably the start of this EPROM. The code at 0066h is the NMI handler. Non maskable interrupt code. That address is fixed for the Z80. You can run that EPROM through DASMX to see a disassembly of it. My guess is that the pcb is a disk controller for a larger system. Maybe the 64K is used as a cache for a hard disk. The 8237 DMA controller would read data from the controller chip and place it in the DRAM. The delay line chip is probably used to generate RAS and CAS timing for the DRAMs. That connector looks like a centronics parallel printer port. But maybe it's for communicating with the rest of the system, as you suggested.
2275 Disk Drive\Hard Drive. Search for "Wang vintage computer model 2200MVP and 2200 hard disc and 5.25 floppy Drive", there is a picture of a circuit board marked 8396.
I didn't see your comments, but yeah, that's pretty unambiguously pinned down in my book.
Yeah, looks like a winner, seems to have been a separate chassis with the drives and that board in it which connect back to the host, the connector layout on the back of the 8396 board lines up with this card.
Didn't see this but here's the service manual - www.wang2200.org/docs/peripheral/2275_DiskPeripheralMaintenance.741-1345-A.10-85.pdf
The black "paint" you see on the component side of the board is actually an inner layer. This is a multilayer board with at least a power or ground layer buried (or maybe both). Wang made a PC, but it was an AT class machine (I used one at work). I think the Word Processors were Z-80 based.
I was about to say! And not uncommon either.
Just looking at the chip density, it's multi-layer.
I had never seen a board like that. Yes, it was indeed strange the the traces were on top of the that black stuff, which looks like CRT Dag.
@@BrendaEM A multilayer board like that has traces and planes (power and ground) sandwiched inside the fiberglas reinforced resin substrate. Inner layers are usually coated in copper oxide to enhance the bonding. Usual procedure was to put the ground plane just under the components to minimize cross-talk among signals. Solder mask was originally thought only necessary to prevent solder bridging during wave solder assembly and thus was not applied to the component side. We later learned that solder mask had value on both sides of the board.
Wang originally made a PCXT class machine than 8086 processor. It was a chassis with an interface bus that all the boards, including the CPU board, would fit into. The boards were extremely large and, while it could run MS-DOS, it was not IBM PC compatible. IBM PC compatibility could be achieved with a large and expensive compatibility board that went next to the CPU board. They were not well supported by anyone and the only software available was VisiCalc and Wang’s own word processing.
Hey dude. Just wanted to let you know I love the style of your videos. You are one of the few TH-camrs I watch as soon as I can, and I never tab out. Thanks and keep up the good work.
well, my comment got deleted for whatever reason…
it's the controller board for a Wang 2275 drive enclosure. they came with either 1 HD & 1 Floppy, or 2 HDs, all 5¼". the 2275 belonged to the Wang 2200 PCS series mini-computer. I I guess I won't link the 2275's product sheet and manual, since I don't know if that's what got my last comment killed.
Nice find
weird so did mine with a link to the service documentation....
let's try this again. I converted this to be searchable.
drive.google.com/file/d/1WK7Ay1NY2lI4c_VMpg3mHwEhK1RsEw4k/view?usp=share_link
It could be almost anything. Wang tried a whole lot of different technologies, from stand alone word processors to shared logic minicomputers, to almost an IBM compatible mainframe system. In that time there were no firm rules so there were a lot of weird hybrid machines of all sorts. Wang’s profit margins were huge, so they could afford to over-engineer a disk controller. Steve Wozniak did a disk controller with 7 cheap chips and a PROM but he had very different constraints.
Important to note that it was to save on the cost of the original Shugart interface electronics.
@@graealex Yep, I count 70 logic packages on the Shugart controller! Copies of it that I've seen made by other companies, they're usually like 11x17 inch boards and cost like $3000 each! Woz did the incredible.
5-1/4" floppies used just a single 34 pin cable... Winchester hard drives on the other hand used two cables, the 34 pin floppy type cable and a second smaller cable. Exactly like what's on that card. I'm betting what you have is something akin to a very early disk array controller or SAN unit.
Edit: the more I think on it the more convinced I am that's actually the drive control board from a Wang mainframe system. That big Centronics connector almost certainly plugs into the backplane.
Let's not forget that hard drives came in a 5 1/4 format as well.
Could be similar to the hawk ffc board.
The 36 way Amphenol connector was used for parallel printer ports before IBM used the DB25. Designed at Centronics, a subsidiary of Wang Laboratories, By An Wang. (et al.)
I _thought_ that was a printer port! "Centronics", now there's a name I have not heard in a long time.
This female connector (centronics) is usually on the printer
I shouted "Centronics!" as soon as I saw the close-up :)
Centronics ! For sure, so reminiscent :)
A lot of printers still had those 36-pin connectors with a DB25 on the other end.
As you say, using a Z80 on a disk controller board is not unheard of. The bigger iron used complex strategies: Disk caching, predictive read-ahead, optimizing the request queue for efficient head travel, etc. etc. Not something your average chip can do and not something you want to burden the main processor with.
Indeed, every 1541 has its own 6502.
@@polluks2 True, but I think that has more to do with the way disks were implemented in the Commodore line. Tacked onto their proprietary external bus instead of connected to the main bus.
@@russellhltn1396 Proprietary? It's IEEE-488.
There was another one on ebay as well. I dug a little and wikipedia mentions a Wang OIS that had either an 8080 or a z80 processor and 64k RAM:
Would have liked to see some close-ups of both the blue connector pairs. The black connector is a Centronics parallel printer connector. My suspicion is that's a print spooler board. Jobs are spooled to the floppy drive, and it dequeues and prints them. The printer might be a dot matrix, band, or chain printer. It's not going to be a laser printer, for sure.
chain printer goodness, like a 1403 (as pictured in Strangelove)
That doesn't explain the DMA and MFM and floppy chips though. I believe this is a dual disk controller.
@@RossComputerGuy "spooled to the floppy drive" -- MFM and floppy chips. Also, DMA is not strictly for storage devices. You can use DMA for memory memory, memory -> I/O port, and I/O port -> memory.
J.C. Wren - I think you might be right.
It's hard to find any info online for Wang Computers stuff, even decent photos of the various boards.
It doesn't make sense that it would have quite so much RAM on, unless it was loading up quite a bit of data.
And the lack of other connectors makes me think it's from a word processor, where the rest of the system can access this board via a terminal board and monitor / keyboard.
I doubt the Centronics port would be for an external floppy drive, because in 1986-87, it was prime-time for the 36-pin Centronics port for parallel printers. Around that time, it almost makes no sense that it would be for anything else. hehe
So yeah, possibly a floppy controller with buffer RAM to hold a few pages of text or graphics.
(64KB could store a LOT of text, so I'm thinking this would be capable of loading graphics as well.)
Give it about two days, though, and I'm sure somebody on Discord will have a full emulator running for it. lol
They will likely have disassembled and commented half the Z80 code from that main ROM, too.
Is this prehaps the Wang WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection)? It's mentioned on their Wikipedia page as an add-on board for the Wang PC with a Z80 and 64k of ram. It's mentioned as being 2 large boards, so prehaps this is only half of it. From what it sounds like, it was a product to allow the Wang PC to connect to the OIS and VS products.
This card could be a multi disk controller card. The DMA, 2 counters, Z80, MFM controller, and floppy controller gives it away to me. Z80 is for bus access and routes control between MFM and floppy. The DMA chip is then used to transfer onto the bus.
Could it be an early version of an HBA or RAID? That was kinda my first impressions when looking at it.
@@cameronwetzel6227 No, and I'm on the discord server. Some manuals were posted and it is in fact for this exact card. There's even a 3 drive controller variant. I've read through a bit and it actually uses all the memory for buffering.
So how does it connect to the Wangwriter's backplane bus then? Through that 36 pin connector on the outside? Does that even expose the machine's bus at all?
@@Stoney3K this is an external unit like a C64's floppy drives. There is an entire enclosure and a cable for data that connects to the host machine.
@@RossComputerGuy What I'm wondering about is if the Wangwriter even has such a connection or if this is for a different system entirely.
That weird non-db25 connector looks like a centronics parallel printer port...
What you have is an IEEE488/hpib bus disk controller, IEEE488 needs quite a bit to make it talk etc.
For example, have a look at early Commodore disk drives, like the 8250, they have as much 'computer' in them as the Commodore computer itself, even much later C64 drives have a 6502 micro board, with lots of IC's
IEEE488 protocol is very high level, as in you don't generally ask for sectors and tracks etc, but ask for a directory list, or 'here, go store this file', with the drive taking care of the disks directory & where to actually put that data on the disk. So basically the drive IS the disk operating system (DOS)
Exactly. The 1541 disk drives have their own 6502 CPU, 2K of RAM, 16K of ROM and talks over an IEC serial bus to a Commodore 64/128/VIC-20 etc. And that looks like this card is fairly similar in nature.
IEEE488 was a 24-pin connector, this s a 34-pin connector, they are very unlikely to be the same interface.
I don't think it's an IEEE-488 device controller. The connector on it is 36 pins, whereas IEEE-488 used a 24 pin connector.
I'd guess it's the same concept as a IEEE488 disk controller, but using a proprietary communications protocol.
@@LeftoverBeefcake as do the pets 2031, sgd-2001 and 4050 ieee-488 drives
In general thanks for sharing these crazy computing journeys
The connector on the back is a SCSI bus connector. That board is a disk cabinet control board. It was used for floppy and hard drives as well. The reason it has a Z80 and RAM is because Wang, like most mini computer makers, built IO Processors. That is a single board computer, but dedicated to disk processing.
Just had the exact same thought, and now I feel old.
SCSI connectors had 50 pins at that time. Centronics printer connectors have 36 pins, but the two connectors were otherwise the same.
@@reilleysinventions4155 SCSI-2 connectors had 50 pins. Original, SCSI-1 connectors had 36 pins.
@@joemonktx I worked at Wang on SCSI during its earliest development. The first connectors were Centronics type 50 pin connectors. The signals were all on one side of the connector and the ground lead of the twisted pair were on the other side of the connector. The next generation used a smaller, more dense 50 pin connector, then wide SCSI (16 bit) used a 68 pin version of the same dense connector. There was a non-standard 25 pin (DB25) version of SCSI that Apple used, but no one else. There is a great article on wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_connector. I still use SCSI for some devices!
@@reilleysinventions4155 I worked at National FSI in Dallas on Wang hardware (We outsold Wang's own office in the banking industry, and had the second VS80 in Texas). In addition, I worked at El Paso Natural Gas on RSF on the VS300 (14 VS300s all coupled together on RSF).
My curiosity is always peaked when I see a mystery Wang in my feed.
For future reference, the word is spelled piqued in this context.
@@Bobbias Thanks, I'll make sure to erect my spelling next time.
@@Bobbias Pedant Squad Assemble!
Others have pointed it out but the 36-pin connector is typically a Centronics parallel port, although it's strange to see it with screws instead of the metal clips that are more common.
That connector reminds me of proprietary SCSI connectors. That'd basically explain the single board computer aspect as well (as most SCSI was implemented as computercomputer rather than the devicecomputer architecture we think of now)
@@humanesque SCSI connectors had 50 pins and Centronics printer connectors had 36 pins, otherwise the connectors were the same.
I managed a Wang VS minicomputer system for the US Air Force from 1989 to 1992. It used six 288 MB disc pack drives. The user terminals consisted of dumb terminals (Wang workstations) and 8086, 286 and 386 PCs. The original Wang 8086 PC was a beast.
those dumb terminals were quite possibly smarter than you think. although Wang did have a basic serial port dumb terminal most of them were run on 1 or 2 Z80s and had 16 to 64k of ram. The 64K ones could run up to 4 seperate sessions at a time, and they were block mode screen transfers to the computer, 2K at a time after having validated the editable fields for char or numeric values, white space and required entries (all done in the terminal).
Seeing These old tech items is like viacomagra for a fool who knows little about em though I collect and love the whole aethstetic feel of old tech.
Wang had a 2336-DW Terminal that had a Z80 processor and I think 1 or 2 floppies. Not sure if this is it, but may be in the ballpark.
The connectors look like typical MFM HDD connectors tho. Who knows, maybe this is a raid controller since the 2 Control connectors are....2 different ones instead of just one. And then the memory.
Interesting bit of trivia-- Dr. Wang is the guy that encouraged Shugart to build the first 5.25-inch floppy. Shugart was going to put an AC motor in it but Dr. Wang immediately vetoed that-- the AC motor would have required a phasing capacitor half the size of the disk drive and the AC magnetic field would have screwed up the CRT display. Very smart man.
So the question was already answered in the comments, but speaking of your live thoughts through out the video this board kinda reminds me Atari LDW Super 2000 floppy drive. It had Z80 CPU, 2 kB of RAM and dedicated floppy disk controller chip. Used Atari serial I/O bus to connect to the 8-bit machine.
There were mods that you could upgrade memory to 64K and run CP/M inside it, then used terminal emulator on Atari to connect to OS running inside floppy drive.
The dark background is likely power and ground planes on internal layers of the board. Are the top traces actually bare solder coated traces, or might they have a clear solder mask on them? Anyway, I'd be more keen to try powering it up, locate power rails from IC's to the big brown plug (probably), and then try to see if there are any video generation type chips on there to try locating a video signal from, etc...
Given the set of chips it looks like this is an intelligent floppy + harddisk controller. Part of the 64K memory will be dedicated to data transfer cache accessible by DMA. The main Z80 processor will be occupied with housekeeping and managing the Centronix connector data protocol. The CTC timers will also use the DMA controller to generate the timing signals for the MFM harddisk drive.
That was neat. Idk what that board is, but I like watching you think and talk about it. Pretty cool!
I always give my thumbs up for the bunny... I don't even understand this kind of videos but this channel is so cute.
In case you never found this out: Are there still any Wang catalog listings online for Wang in 1986? That's the date on many of those chips; 8632. Looking carefully at those catalogs, and comparing device sizes, would give you a massive clue about what it is/was.
I have a weird OMTI SCSI and MFM Dual HDD Controller board. Its like 2 book-sized PCB's who god knows what. It has Euro connectors. I just kept it because it looks kinda cool and I had ISA/Zorro II OMTI HDD Controllers before! Your board looks unjustifiably large for 2 Winchester drives....1986....Reminds me of the Atari Megafile PCB's inside the case. Also huge for just converting MFM HDD's to a DMA Bus.
SCSI-1 controller for two hard drives, ST506 or similar. The Z80 and memory are for dealing with SCSI, MFM for the hard drives, and DMA to connect the two. You can tell it's SCSI and not IBM parallel because of the three sets of terminating resistors right next to the connector. It has two different clocks because SCSI-1 runs at 10 MHz, but MFM drives can't go that fast. I suspect that the red 6-pin connector in the middle is power for the whole board, + and - 5V and a couple of grounds? The drives of the era had a separate 4-pin Molex power connector with +5, -5, +12 and ground if I remember correctly. The drive data (narrow) and control (wide) cables should just be straight through ribbons. Good luck!
Haha, I love your shot transitions!
There is a Listing on eBay right now for a Wang P-S3-3 that has that same connector on the back. This could be the motherboard for a Wang PC compatible. That 10 87 looking date code coup pt this as a late model
That PCB looks familiar, I am pretty sure it is from a Wang OIS (Office Information System). Really not much more than a multi-user word processing system. There would be other PCB's in the system as well for multi terminals (they did not use RS232 but coax) as well. Unfortunately I dumped all my service manuals that covers the Wang OIS, DP2200 and VS systems about 3 years ago.
Lovely bunny as always!
With the 36 pin connector I would have assumed early SCSI connection, with the 4 different types of drive connectors, it may be the main board for an early Platter hard drive ( think old, cake dome covered when not inserted platters ).
Looking at the rear connector, I was reminded of Centronics parallel-port connectors. It is called a micro-ribbon 36-pin female connector, likely Centronics given the number of pins. I suggest to read about Centronics Data Computer Corporation which began as a division of Wang Laboratories. Also of interest, the parallel port and micro ribbon connector articles on the Wikipedia. Strangely, in 1987 Centronics sold its printer business and used the proceeds to buy Ekco Housewares. You may have some kitchen utensils made by Ekco in your home at this very moment (I do, as does my mom).
I see lots of interesting theories in the comments. As you alluded to, the board is surely more than an ordinary disk controller, even though it says 5 1/4 disk control. To be clear I am not saying the connector is necessarily for a printer. From my reading, Wang had a whole bunch of surplus micro-ribbon connectors left over from an early calculator design and so they appeared in various places.
I'm going to leap in at 5:54 before watching the rest and take a stab that this could be more than a floppy controller board, it's a filesystem board? That is the host(s) throw high level file IO at it and it handles the nitty gritty. Sort of like Commodore's floppy drives but in my experience of it talking about the setup of certain ASMP unix based systems.
you Americans are so professional TH-camrs - here in germany the phone in one hand screwdriver in other hand method is still common
It may be a 1986 design but that particular board was probably assembled sometime around April '87.
I saw a date code of 10/87 on one of the ROM chips (IIRC), so October 1987 or slightly later.
@@Qyngali that'll be 10th WEEK 1987 not October.
@@SomeMorganSomewhere brain fart, I need coffee. 🤣
@@Qyngali Looking again I spotted an 8713 date code, so that's the end of March.
The Wang PC Professional Computers' Winchester card was based on a Z80 processor, with a 4k ROM containing firmware.
This seems like a "PC-compatibility" card! Will DMA cables attach to any of those blue connectors? That might be how the two computers communicate with each other. That weird port on the edge reminds me a little of a parallel port.
At least the beard space and time continuum seems to be restoring itself.
I agree with the initial conclusion it must be some kind of SBC. Find a 5v rail and just power it up. You would expect at least one of the chips to give you serial. Either find and trace it or just probe the mystery port with the scope or logic analyzer. It has to have in and output somewhere.
Edit: there are some comments saying it's just a disk controller for some Wang systems drive. I'd say power and probe it.
I bet a closer look thru the ROM will sort it out if someone in the comments doesn't already know. It would be easy to suss out what pins are power and the format of the resulatant data to interface with the thing if you really wanted to.
Phoned Wang Labs back in the late 80's to inquire about a two-tone encoder we came across while replacing some county-wide systems. We decoded the codes we knew we needed, but no one could produce the whole matrix or expected format for all of it. After providing every number on and in the unit, along with dates etc off the eprom we were told that it didn't appear anywhere in catalogs or notes and that "Dr Wang" was know to put side-projects together and send them out without any further documentation !?!!!.
Nice hopping to the bench. LOL.
First off, It would look great in a frame on the wall.
The 4Mhz crystal will be for the Z80 CPU, the 10Mhz might be for the Floppy controller/CTC chips. (If my memory serves me right the Z80 CTC chips use a seperate clock to the Z80 CPU)
I think it is a single board computer. I've seen that black connector, (8:10), on the back before, I just can't bring it to mind.
Apart from that, I'm no help at all. :)
The black colour is actually the ground plain. The board will be 3 to 5 layers and one of those will be what you can see as a black. But if you pick a spot where there is no tracers you can scratch through the fibreglass to it and see the copper.
This could be an early SCSI SCSI MFM disk drive controller board from a 2 drive HD enclosure. Typically would have had 2x 300MB Disk units plugged into it. Reminds me of the Sun disk Unit I used to use that was connected to old Sun 68020 work stations. Didn't Wang produce an early Unix system at all?
with that connector, I think maybe it emulates a parallel printer, and captures the print data to floppy disk
Was thinking that looks like an old "female" parallel, not so rare maybe. Maybe it wasn't, they often has side clips IIRC but it sure looked like one at first glance.
Hi res photos of both sides would really be great, YT compression is pretty cruel to quality.
Back in the late 80s, our machine at work was a Sanyo Icon (which sorta blurred the lines between mini, micro and mainframe)... as well as it's main 68020 processor board, it also had another (I think) 68000 board which was the "disk/cache processor" that had it's own RAM, mostly for disk cache.... well I wonder if this is a similar thing for Z80 land, Wang systems???? The DMA might be to feed data from the cache over to the main processors RAM????? The "not serial" connector looks a bit like a Centronics parallel printer port.
My first reaction is this is a board of of Wang's mini-computer/multi-user system that would live in a computer room. However, the lack of connectors is bothering me. I would have expected a card edge connector so it could be put into a card cage. At this point, I am thinking it is more like a single board computer. It looks like it mounts to a baseplate instead of a card cage. That one connector on the card end looks like a classic Centronics parallel port before IBM established the DB25 standard.
I think that is is an external hard or floppy disk box for 2 MFM drives. I would expect that your weird looking connector is something like a SCSI interface.
It looks similar to the CBM PET external dual floppy station. That used an entire 6502 system to drive two micropolis floppy drives.
The CBM floppy also had a large RAM bank.
Considering where Wang vwas used it must have been a storage device for one of Wang's Minicomputers. Maybe someone among your subscribers has a pin out for that device.
The Z80 was Very popular among designers for peripheriials. I worked at Nixdorf Computers in the late 1980s and it was used like a micro controller for sublemevtary tasks. The octopus 8818 Telephone exchange used the Z80 massively parallel. Every subscriber card had one.
So, you finding the Z80 on a disk controller is not that unusual.
Good hunting!
The lack of a bus connector on this is very confusing, The form factor suggests something out of a Wang Professional Computer. They were 8086/80286 based but did have a separate Winchester controller board. I'm wondering if this could have come out of a late model OIS 40/50/60. I wasn't working much with Wang after 1986 and didn't get any time on the "baby OIS" boxen.
Assuming that the board is late 86 early 87 the form factor seems to be full AT. Board purpose seems to be disk board or terminal. Perhaps a prototype?
DMA controller means OS. It would be interesting to see if that parallel port is directly connected to the CPU BUS. I bet is a single board computer with a specific software for word processing in conjunction of a terminal trough the parallel port. OS and data disks might require two different drives. Might also be used in industrial applications and CNC machines as old PDPs.
I remember in the late 1980s, there was a big push to connect (at the time) 'modern' computers to 9-track-tape drives, primarily for extracting and post-processing seismic data, which was held on tens of thousands of tape reels. I also remember the controllers for those things being massively complex, with multiple (twisted-pair) ribbon cables coming from them. I wonder if that's what that thing is?
The blue connectors are putting me a lot more in mind of MFM or RLL Hard drive connectors than floppy drive connectors. It looks like roughly contemporary Wang micros were labeling them Winchesters, 🤷🏻♂. Maybe for the 2200 series? We'd have a better idea, if every picture of every port on every 2200 including the one currently on ebay, wasn't the WORST PICTURE EVER.
I believe it to be the board from a Wang 2275 Disk Drive\Hard Drive
Yes - it's for the 2200 - there's a diagram for the 8396 on page 2 here, that's pretty clearly a match www.wang2200.org/docs/peripheral/2275_DiskStorageUnit_InternalMemos.pdf
That points us to the Wang Model 2275 Disk Peripheral, which appears to be the box that the 8396 sits in. www.wang2200.org/docs/datasheet/2275_DiskPeripheral_DataSheet.715-0045.7-84.pdf
Yeah, this is a dual drive controller which can take up to 2 MFM drives each holding 30Mb.
As far as the why? I don't think it is an IEEE 488 bus device, but it's probably very much on the same principles (cf Commodore 1541), and it's probably implementing the hard disk controller (which in the MFM case included a lot of smarts that would go on the drive in later standards) using discrete logic.
From the "Centronics" wiki page: "Centronics began as a division of Wang Laboratories". My guess for the connector on the back is also that it might be a Centronics parallel printer poort. Maybe checkout this wiki page for clues.
Commodore did similar things on their Floppy drives (on a lower cost). They were basically computer. Maybe this floppy drive controller was able to communicate with multiple computer so that multiple computer can share this floppy drive. Maybe it was even able to copy floppies by it self without needing a extra computer all the time. Commodore units where able to do this.
Just looked on eBay and saw another WANG 8396 very similar to yours and is described as follows. Vintage Wang 8396 - r1m1 Wang Circuit Mother Board System Computer. It's probably not a full computer motherboard but probably a board from a Wang Terminal, usually comprising a monitor, motherboard (in a single unit), and keyboard.That is my guess anyway.
The black connector looks like a Centronics CN36 (36 pin) printer connector that was commonly used in the 1980s.
Seems like it is a floppy controller designed to sit on some bigger computers I/O channel and blast data through it with DMA. Maybe even has some read/write cache?
it looks to me like a terminal emulator with the ability to save to floppy(wang propriatary floppy), maybe the connector on the back was meant to have various adapters... there may have been a 2nd board that plugged into a backplane of a bigger computer(ibm maybe), can see screw holes on the left side and in the center where standoffs could go to mount it, right where it would need to go to plug in the ribbon cables.
so what i think this does is make wang propriatary stuff work on ibm hardware...
Looks like a stand alone hard drive controller for a system that doesnt have the ability to be expanded. Looks like it talks to the main system thru the centronics connnector in the back.
What would be cool is figureing out how it talks thru that connector and seeing if you can get it to start sending out data thru the port.
I'm no expert, but would it even have a power connector in the middle of the board if it was just a blade card instead of a SBC?
This looks a lot like a hard disk controller that replaces the regular FDC card, or it ties into the floppy cable chain. Do the cables match up with a regular XT-style MFM interface? It should take a Seagate ST506 or ST412 hard disk that you can take from any regular 5150.
Did Wang ever make a pc version of their wordprocessor?
"A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of the hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. "
Makes me think of the old Commodore disk drives like the 1541 which had their own CPU, etc. on the drive itself.
if get an old PET drive , you have two CPU´s in .. the 1541 emulate the second cpu via interrupt
easy now ..that hop to the bench was something :)
Wang was into corporate/campus computing networks at the time. They were a major competitor to where I worked which was TRW. Ethernet and such didn’t exist at that scale yet. So networking was done via broad band cable systems. Basically you had 6 MHz Tv channels used for networking. Z80s where the highest performing processor at the time for doing networking/terminal server activities. Not sure this helps with your question but take it for what it’s worth. $0.02!
Correct. The proprietary broadband communication used between all Wang devices was called the "928 link." That name was given to the protocol by Dr. Wang because no one could come up with an appropriate name. So Dr. Wang turned to the design team and said, "Well, today is September 28. That's 9/28, so we'll call it the 928 link."
The Commodore disk drives were literally a separate computer attached to some some drives. I am wondering if its the same thing. The connector on the end is probably a interface cable for connection to something like a Wang writer.
I think it's just a drive controller board with some buffers, those where complex in the day.
From Wikipedia:
"The original Wang PC was released in April 1982 to counter the IBM PC, which had been released the previous August and which had gained wide acceptance in the market for which Wang traditionally positioned the OIS system. It was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor, a faster CPU than the IBM PC's 8088.[49] A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of the hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. The original PC-VS hardware was using the 928 terminal emulator board, the WLOC boards were used in the subsequent 80286 machines."
Alternatively, to me, that board looks like a full workstation main board, which I wonder if it was the guts of a workstation Wang response to systems of the time like DisplayWriter or Xerox 820. The Wang 2200 series was similar in functionality but used the Wang 2200 chip. (The 2200VS looks like really interesting machine. Could program in COBOL, RPG and Assembler using the 360/370 instruction set.) Is there a Wang product catalog around from that time, about 1983 to 1986 (the year on the chip, not the 1986 from the data dump which may have been an update)?
That strange 36 pin terminal seems like a centronics printer port (parallel port) to me.
But it can be another kind of parallel port.
Besides the single board computer I can also imagine a smart HDD/FDD autonomous controller, with support for multiple disk simultaneous accesses and a RAM cache to speed up disk access.
Such a system would use a parallel port to transfer data to/from the main processing system. Much like what happens with SCSI disk systems.
My first guess was CP/M card for some other system. But by '86 CP/M was largely obsolete. And as others have pointed out, it is probably a hard disk controller with a decent read/write buffer. And the back connector sure looks like a Centronics interface use for parallel communications, most well knows are, of course, printers.
I remember 36 pin ports being parallel printer ports. I think you do have a single board microcomputer with floppy disk controller, serial monitor port and printer port. Just a guess but it looks like it.
Commodore disk drives such as the 1541 used a MOS 6502 running at 1MHz and with 2k of RAM. They were more or less computers in their own right. But the RAM on your board does seem excessive.
8250s (PET dual floppy) had two 6502s.
I did wonder if it was part of the 2200, but I see someone has identified it, although looking at 2200 images with google it isn't what I remember, we had a wang machine linked to a cmd drive, with a box with individual cards and a terminal attached, anyway it's brought back memories albeit vague.
Hi,great channel.
Have you tried ebay UK. Some interesting stuff.
My thought would be a laser printer control board. External Centronics parallel port and an internal hard drive for storing fonts on.
The ram could also be for spooling print jobs.... there wasn't so much in the way of software fonts at this time.
nice time spending Sir
Does it have any numbers on the board? Looks like data processing computer board. They usually had 22xx format model numbers.
Interesting mix of TTL *and* CMOS logic devices.
It's simply standalone floppy disk duplicator.The side port connects to dedicated control panel
That certainly looks very like/ is a full computer not just a disk controller.. Definitely.. Maybe. What is missing for that are the normal interface ports like keyboard or display. Could be intended to operate through terminals but that doesn't make much sense for 1986 either. Could be a second board that handles the user interface stuff - but that starts to make it look like part of a larger multiprocessor system. A real mystery.
I am a former Wang employee who created and manages a Wang Alumni group on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to include you - we read like a Who''s Who in computing and boast 2700+ members.
That is one enormous Wang
It might not have been designed as an SBC in the direct sense, but with such capable resources I'm sure it could be 'persuaded' to do that duty with new ROMs. :-)
It look like a file server for a network of some kind because the only outside connector is the micro-ribbon one with shield contacts
Is it a Board from an 80’s stand up arcade game?? Centipede or Donkey Kong . The IC in frame at time index 3:10 is a 1983 Logic Gate. My guess is still atacase game or The WOPR from the 1983 movie War Games. 😂. Never know. Thanks for the cool videos
Massive Wang floppy disk!
It is most definitely a "Wigwam for a Goose's bridle"
Damn nice board, it's sooooo densely populated that even modern mobos are much more sparse. Makes me wonder how many layers it has.
Highly unlikely it has more than 4 layers. 2 layers is possible, but with a board that dense, that's also unlikely.
it might be the board you bought of ebay?
Vintage Wang. 8396 - r1m1 Circuit Mother Board System Computer.Untested, pulled out of a computer that powered on. No other info offered.
That one has different color ribbon cable connectors.
@@ravenbarsrepairs5594 It also went to Norway now I look again