what the heck is it

On 18 Nov 2007 at 11:00, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote: Signetics bipolar microcontroller stuff. Very interesting in that the 8x330 is used--it's the floppy controller of the series; you don't run across them very much. It's designed to interface with the 8x300 series and nothing else. The 8x320 is the register array usually used to interface the 8x300 to external systems. You should probably find some bipolar RAM and ROM there also as well as some I/O ports (8T32/8T36). What makes this unusual is that it's found on an 8085 system with 5.25" floppies rather than a traditional MOS FDC. Were this only for floppies, this definitely would have been a ridiculously expensive implementation for the time (and power-hungry). However, I wonder if that board doesn't also have a hard disk interface connector (e.g. SA4000) which would have been right for the time--and made sense. Is there an EPROM for the 8085 on the main board? If so, have you dumped it? It might clinch the identification. Cheers, Chuck