10 Apr
2005
10 Apr
'05
2:48 p.m.
On Apr 7, 2005 2:49 PM, Edward <edward at groenenberg.net> wrote:
Actually not. I had 3 of them (did give 2 away to
friends). They are original
DEC issued ones. It may have been a marketing joke of some sort.
Those were not made by DEC, as I narrated in length in a previous
post, but by my former employer, Software Results Corp. Somewhere, I
have the original artwork. The presense of "SRC" on the copper legend
and the absence of any Digital logos or copyrights is consistent with
its history.
They were produced around 1980-1981, when SRC produced their first
non-DEC-based product, the COMBOARD(R)-1, a 68000-based bisync engine
for Unibus. It replaced a chassis of DEC cards like a KDJ11, DPV11,
MSV11... with a single board. The grant card was needed because at
the time, we could not get dual-height grant cards with NPR grant from
DEC.
These days, I happen to have a *lot* more COMBOARDs than grant cards.
I keep thinking I should find a way to hack them into SCSI or IDE
interfaces. They wouldn't be MSCP, so drivers would be required (they
do not conform to DEC's register pattern, so it would be really
difficult to make one appear to be another, known, controller). With
all of the Classic distractions around me, I never seem to have any
time for such a project.
-ethan