Weird BiPolar ROM programmer

Subject: Weird BiPolar ROM programmer From: "Joe R." <rigdonj at cfl.rr.com> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:48:10 +0000 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org I was out today and found an interesting looking box made by Aydin Controls. It looks like a BiPolar PROM programmer. It has two 8 pin ZIP sockets marked Read and two others marked Program along with several LED diplays (TIL 311s! :-) and a lot of switches and pushbuttons on it. It looks old so I decided to open it up and see what kind of microprocessor it had in it. However I couldn't find one! It has four AMD 2101 RAMs, twelve TIL 311 displays, a COM 2017 UART and a COM 5016 baud rate generator but everything else looks like standard 74xx TTL. I couldn't find anything that looked like ROM, PROM, EPROM or a CPU. Is it possible that this thing is all controlled by TTL logic? Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? FWIW most of the ICs are dated 1982 so I guess it that's when it was made. Joe