Couple of cool HP 110/150 finds (HP88396/395)

At 02:17 PM 5/11/00 -0500, Joe wrote: I also have an 88395. It has been a puzzle for me. The enclosure is the same of such HPIL gadgets as the 82164 and 82165. However, the power supply connector is different; mine in fact had a big wart xformer attached made by AT&T and rated 20VAC, 2A, and marked "security isolation transformer". Inside, there is an MC68B09FN uController, an NCR SCSI chip, an MB8464-15 static ram, a 28 pin ROM, bridge+filter+regulator, and finally, what seems like too much glue logic (14 chips) near the parallel port. In particular, there is a 20 pin quad (TI 901FF) somewhere between the data bus and the paralell port. Perhaps some clocked parallel I/O? or a FIFO? Seems to me that they were trying to increase the speed of the parallel port to meet that of the SCSI chip at the other end. The chips were all manufactured in '88 or before, so I'd say this was built in '89 . This was a device designed to provide SCSI connectivity to something that had parallel ports and no easy way of adding other cards; I don't think that it was intended for Vectras. I suspect that this was designed to give the HPIB-based 9000-300 systems (which had a parallel port) the opportunity to talk to SCSI tape drives, perhaps even HD's (though not for boot devices, I'm sure). 1989 is about the right time; it was then that it became clear that HPIB hard disks were a dead end. carlos