26 Dec
2008
26 Dec
'08
5:32 p.m.
that may be another piece to the puzzle, as I remember that autozone,
before z-net came in with diskless pcs(i think that's what they are)
they were basic rs232 terminals on redhat linux....hope that helps
On 12/26/08, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
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...?