4 Jul
2006
4 Jul
'06
3:15 p.m.
Just seems strange - but I wonder if it was a
marketing move and they
deliberately crippled the port? Maybe there was some plan for an I/O board
that could be sold (doubtless at great expense) to anyone wanting to use their
PC for control purposes.
There is (or was). The Data Acquistiion Adapter. It includes a 16 bit
parallel I/O port, ADC, DAC, etc. I have one, the user manual and the
techref.
The connector on the bracket is, IIRC a DC62. There was a breakout panel
that I don't have to link it to your hackery. I do have the loopback
plug (for testing), and of course the techref gives the pinouts.
In fact, maybe that was another intended use (which
never happened) for the
board that's used to connect a PC to the expansion chassis? (I've never seen
or looked at details of one of those boards - but presumably it's full of
generic I/O lines)
The expansion chassis interface is basically a load of buffers for the 8
bit ISA bus lines. Cards in the expansion chassis appear as they would if
they were in the main machine.
-tony