16 Oct
2008
16 Oct
'08
6:02 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
There are 5 PCBs inside the case. One just holds 2
LEDs. Another is the
SMPSU. Which leaves 3 boards for digital stuff. One has the 80188 and
peripheral interface chips -- I forget the details, but theu're all
pretty standard. Another has The TMS34010, RAMDAC and lots of RAM on it.
And the last is a daughterboard for that one and contains 10 or so EPROMs
containing the XSerer and fonts.
Interesting. I've seen quite a few network interfaces controlled via 80188
CPUs in larger systems around the mid-late 80s - I wonder if they borrowed one
such design and added the ability for it to drive keyboard/mouse interfaces,
or whether they designed the network side from scratch...
I'm not familiar with the TMS34010 though. The only xterm I have is an NCD 88k
one; there's just one main board (CPU, RAM, display) and a daughterboard
(network and ROMs). Same deal as yours, though - takes a standard ps/2
keyboard and RS232 mouse. Video was via a DB26 though, for some obscure reason
(IIRC most of the pins were n/c - maybe they had some future functionality in
mind that never happened)
cheers
Jules