Can anyone identify what this board is/does?

On 2017-Dec-01, at 7:12 AM, Tony Aiuto via cctalk wrote: That's very funny. It looks to be a core rope memory that hasn't been programmed.

Other organisations might be possible, but it looks like a pulse-transformer type of core-rope, where the cores are just for ordinary induction, not switching/memory cores. - the matrix of black what-look-to-be diodes would be data-wire isolation diodes - the little brown 'stools' are wire routing posts - you can see the mulit-turn sense windings (bluish) already present on the cores - above the cores are the sense amplifiers or 1st stage thereof - there is one wire through all the cores, perhaps a test wire for core and sense amp response Each data-wire would start at one of the solder pins in the pin matrix on the left, weave through the cores to encode the data, turn back 180, then 90 degrees around one of the stools to drop down and terminate at the solder pin by an isolation diode. There would be another board for decoding the address to 1-of-x and 1-of-y. I didn't count precisely but it looks like it would be 256 words of 20 bits. That might be a date code of 6847 on a cap (or is it 6B47?), so perhaps earlier than the listing-stated 1981. Actually, it kind of hints at it in the description: "With out Firmware ROM wire (empty slots)"

wrote: The last picture has "???-5". Some googling takes us to https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%97%D0%A3 "DZU is a factory in Stara Zagora , a major producer of magnetic disk storage devices (hard drives and floppy disks) during the rise of computer production in Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s, century. Today it is part of VIDEOTON Holding ZRt., Hungary [1] ." The article says it was a disk drive factory, but maybe... -- Charles