25 Dec
2008
25 Dec
'08
11:55 p.m.
Ian King wrote:
Google is failing me on this one. A while back, I picked up some random boards on ePay.
The boards all have the name TRIAD, and they include a passive backplane, what appears to
be a central controller with an FPGA and a bunch of RAM, and several boards that each
contain two Z80s and ten 8530 serial communication chips. One of the oddest things in the
silk screening is the identification of two of the ribbon connectors across the top of
these latter boards: "LAMB/DROID, ODD HALF" and "EVEN HALF".
(Ironically, I just finished a really good science fiction story regarding a sheep,
entitled "The Android's Dream"....)
The only hints I've found are that this may be the guts of a PBX or other telecom
unit. Does anyone have any insight on this? I'm asking because there are a lot of
cool chips on these boards, but before I render them down for spare parts I want to be
sure I'm not destroying anything significant. It sure looks like some sort of
distributed processing architecture, but I have no idea what it was processing. Thanks
for any ideas -- Ian
Just a guess or possibility, as it could be lots of things, but perhaps a
serial/RS232 switch, the sort of thing that Gandalf and Develcon made in the
80's to permit many terminals to selectively connect to one or more machines...?