24 Aug
2005
24 Aug
'05
11:38 a.m.
On 8/24/05, Paul Koning <pkoning at equallogic.com> wrote:
One possibility is that it's a third party board
with handles
manufactured by DEC attached to them. DEC sold those handles
separately, and you could just attach them to your own board...
That was quite common with 3rd party boards. We used real DEC
stiffener/latches for our Unibus and Qbus products, but we never
stamped a number on them anywhere. You had to see the pattern of
lights to locate our board in the backplane (easy because we had 3
clusters of 4-LED DialLite assemblies). Out of the backplane, though,
we clearly marked our boards with model number and our address/phone
number (1-800-SRC-DATA)
Yet another thing to look for: DEC boards have a DEC
logo ("digital"
in 7 blocks -- unless it's quite old) somewhere on the board, almost
certainly near the edge.
That depends on your definition of "quite old". I don't recall ever
seeing a Digital logo on the boards that were hand-taped. Once DEC
moved to machine-routed boards with solder mask, _that_ era all had a
logo in copper. So... some time in the late 1970s to early 1980s
would be where I remember seeing logos (Rainbows, Professional 3xx...
that era). Older Qbus stuff may or may not have a logo (but I _think_
all the Qbus stuff was designed with CAD).
-ethan
P.S. - it _does_ look like Qbus to me - I think I see grant jumpers on
the right side fingers on the view of the solder side.
P.P.S. - just because there are lots of ECOs doesn't mean that the
board wasn't a production board... we shipped our first "COMBOARD-II"s
to customers with 14 component adds (mostly resistors), about 30 cuts
and about 50 jumps. OTOH, that doesn't look like DEC ECO practice
(nor does it have a DEC feel to me). I wouldn't start by looking for
any DEC identifiers - that's pretty clearly a 3rd party board.