30 Dec
2020
30 Dec
'20
10:51 a.m.
On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 2:07 AM Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 8:23 PM Josh Dersch via
cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I'd be interested to see pictures of the card cages. I know what a 980B
looks like and it's a significant revision from the 980 I have here -- the
CPU is condensed from 13 or 14 boards down to four or so. I haven't been
able to find a picture of the 980A's insides, curious to know how it
differs.
A straight TI 980 (not one of the later 980A or
980B variants) appeared
on
my doorstep this afternoon.
Interesting. Unfortunately, I have no docs (outside of what's on
Bitsavers).
Mine is the later 980A variety, FWIW, with fat TI4060 DRAMs not core.
I only recently got a console key for it.
(Anyone have any spare parts? The core memory
boards & chassis are
labeled
well enough for me to see that I'm missing
one of the "DA" boards...)
The only spare parts would be some memory boards. I'll have to pull
them out and check them, but definitely DRAM and I think 8K or 24K
capacity, and I have no idea if they work on all variants or just
specific models. No spare I/O or CPU boards.
I was just glancing over at the docs on Bitsavers to see what it might
take to write a memory tester to toggle in. Nothing exhaustive just
simple write-read-compare testing. I know nothing of the architecture
so even that would take me a bit to figure out.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ti/980/
Somewhere I have a couple of very short programs I hand-assembled to test
out my 980B, I'll see if I can't dig them up... I suspect I left them on my
old laptop.
Thanks,
- Josh
-ethan