3 Mar
2020
3 Mar
'20
4:18 p.m.
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a clue
what system this core board was from:
http://www.classiccmp.org/acornia/tmp/coresmall.jpg
The curved edge connectors (presumably to make board insertion easier) are
quite distinctive, plus the way the power's fed in via an edge connector on
the "far" side of the board. What's interesting to me is the core ring
size; the TTL ICs on the board have 1970 date codes, but I didn't think
that the rings got quite that small until right at the end of core's era,
more toward the end of the decade.
It seems to be 8 blocks of 64x64, i.e. 4KB. p/n on the main board of
2001000755, and just hidden from view under the core daughterboard is a
logo that says "LEC", which I suppose might be meaningful.
There's a bigger (2181x1863) image as "coreboard.jpg" in the same dir if
more detail helps (I doubt it), but it's 2.4MB so maybe save Jay's
bandwidth by only looking at that one if you absolutely have to :-)
thanks,
Jules
3 Mar
3 Mar
7:32 p.m.
On 2020-Mar-03, at 4:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one -
does anyone have a clue what system this core board was from:
http://www.classiccmp.org/acornia/tmp/coresmall.jpg
The curved edge connectors (presumably to make board insertion easier) are quite
distinctive, plus the way the power's fed in via an edge connector on the
"far" side of the board. What's interesting to me is the core ring size; the
TTL ICs on the board have 1970 date codes, but I didn't think that the rings got quite
that small until right at the end of core's era, more toward the end of the decade.
It seems to be 8 blocks of 64x64, i.e. 4KB. p/n on the main board of 2001000755, and just
hidden from view under the core daughterboard is a logo that says "LEC", which I
suppose might be meaningful.
There's a bigger (2181x1863) image as "coreboard.jpg" in the same dir if
more detail helps (I doubt it), but it's 2.4MB so maybe save Jay's bandwidth by
only looking at that one if you absolutely have to :-)
Can't help with the system of origin, but a little observational analysis:
It looks to be 16 bits wide rather than 8, I think you'll find there's another 8
bit-arrays of cores on the underside of the planar-array daughter board.
The little upside-down module boards along the top would be the sense amplifiers, the
circuitry along the right would be drivers for one end of the address lines for one axis.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be a complete module. It looks like the inhibit
drivers and 3/4 of the address drivers would have been on another board.
4 Mar
4 Mar
4:37 a.m.
On 3/3/20 9:32 PM, Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote:
It looks to be 16 bits wide rather than 8, I think
you'll find there's
another 8 bit-arrays of cores on the underside of the planar-array
daughter board.
You may well be right; I can't quite tell for sure as there's not much
clearance between the two, but I can see a nest of wires in there.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be a complete
module. It looks like
the inhibit drivers and 3/4 of the address drivers would have been on
another board.
Well, it does have some damage to it, as does another identical board that
I have, so it's unlikely it could ever be used again; I may get a chance to
go back to the site where I picked these up from one day though, and if so
I will take a look, just for the sake of completeness.
cheers
Jules
4:44 a.m.
On 3/3/20 6:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a clue
what system this core board was from
I think I may have figured it out. Back when I picked these up (I have
another one, too) they were in a pile of boards from all sorts of different
systems, as they were at a location which used to be an electronics surplus
store - so I figured they could be anything.
However, I picked up a couple of Lockheed MAC-16 front panels at the time,
and I was just digging through some info on that machine and realized that
it was also known as the LEC-16; in light of that, the little "LEC" logo on
these boards seems telling. That was a 16 bit system (and as Brent
mentioned, there may be another set of core hidden on the other side of the
plane) and was around the 1969/1970 timeframe, so that fits, too.
7:46 a.m.
LEC16 was a copy of the PDP11. Lockheed sold it to BBN. BBN relabeled
it Pluribus.
I was part of the DEC engineering team looking at purchasing the LEC,
as one of the features was the ability to be an Arpanet IMP.
I was quite familiar with t the Unibus, and noticed the print set was
very similar to a negative copy of an 11/20 print set.
I raised this with the boss and legal. The machine was then referred
to as the Lockheed SUE.
//bob
On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 7:44 AM Jules Richardson via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 3/3/20 6:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a clue
what system this core board was from
I think I may have figured it out. Back when I picked these up (I have
another one, too) they were in a pile of boards from all sorts of different
systems, as they were at a location which used to be an electronics surplus
store - so I figured they could be anything.
However, I picked up a couple of Lockheed MAC-16 front panels at the time,
and I was just digging through some info on that machine and realized that
it was also known as the LEC-16; in light of that, the little "LEC" logo on
these boards seems telling. That was a 16 bit system (and as Brent
mentioned, there may be another set of core hidden on the other side of the
plane) and was around the 1969/1970 timeframe, so that fits, too.
8:25 a.m.
On Mar 4, 2020, at 10:46 AM, Bob Smith via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
LEC16 was a copy of the PDP11. Lockheed sold it to BBN. BBN relabeled
it Pluribus.
I was part of the DEC engineering team looking at purchasing the LEC,
as one of the features was the ability to be an Arpanet IMP.
I was quite familiar with t the Unibus, and noticed the print set was
very similar to a negative copy of an 11/20 print set.
I raised this with the boss and legal. The machine was then referred
to as the Lockheed SUE.
//bob
That's interesting. I remember seeing a SUE at the university, but that was not a
PDP-11 clone at all. For one thing, its claim to fame was that it had user-programmable
microcode.
paul
8:32 a.m.
The Unibus was patented. Don't lmpw jpw ,icj pf the WCS/,ocrpcpdomg
SIE jad avao;ab;e/
I do not have the ISA in my head or handy, been more than 30 years
since I touched a Pluribus, BBN version of the SUE.
//bob
On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 11:27 AM Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 11:25:20AM -0500, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
That's interesting. I remember seeing a SUE
at the university, but
that was not a PDP-11 clone at all.
The one at Rice University circa 1978 also had 6? 8? processors in
the cabinet.
mcl 
11:13 a.m.
if it's LEC, it may be for a MAC-16
the form factor of the SUE boards is quite different (single edge connector)
docs under http://bitsavers.org/pdf/lockheed
On 3/4/20 8:32 AM, Bob Smith via cctalk wrote:
The Unibus was patented. Don't lmpw jpw ,icj pf
the WCS/,ocrpcpdomg
SIE jad avao;ab;e/
I do not have the ISA in my head or handy, been more than 30 years
since I touched a Pluribus, BBN version of the SUE.
//bob
5:40 p.m.
On 03/04/2020 10:32 AM, Bob Smith via cctalk wrote:
The Unibus was patented. Don't lmpw jpw ,icj pf
the WCS/,ocrpcpdomg
SIE jad avao;ab;e/
I do not have the ISA in my head or handy, been more than 30 years
since I touched a Pluribus, BBN version of the SUE.
A quick scan of the MAC-16 / SUE instruction set shows it
was an old-school minicomputer
architecture, and nowhere as modern as PDP-11.
Jon
11:15 a.m.
found it in this MAC-16 ad
https://adspast.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=62927
On 3/3/20 4:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a clue what system
this core board was from:
http://www.classiccmp.org/acornia/tmp/coresmall.jpg
12:31 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote Re: Mystery 1970 core board:
found it in this MAC-16 ad
https://adspast.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=62927
The MAC-16 in this ad looks odd. The front panel has nothing behind
it...or at least, very little. I'm not familiar with the MAC-16, but
either the ad has a mock-up of the machine(seems plausible given the
tendencies of marketing), or the front panel is a real waste of rack
space. The electronics appear to be in a box below the front panel,
with only a small area of overlap between the electronics chassis and
the front panel, and nothing but air behind it.
Is this the way the system was really put together?
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
12:40 p.m.
It is interesting, the way the edge connector is curved. I wish I'd seen this done on
more boards. Sometimes I want to use a hammer to assist in inserting cards. My Nicolet has
two and sometimes three 80 pin connectors.
Dwight
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Rick Bensene via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 12:31 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: RE: Mystery 1970 core board
Al Kossow wrote Re: Mystery 1970 core board:
found it in this MAC-16 ad
https://adspast.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=62927
The MAC-16 in this ad looks odd. The front panel has nothing behind
it...or at least, very little. I'm not familiar with the MAC-16, but
either the ad has a mock-up of the machine(seems plausible given the
tendencies of marketing), or the front panel is a real waste of rack
space. The electronics appear to be in a box below the front panel,
with only a small area of overlap between the electronics chassis and
the front panel, and nothing but air behind it.
Is this the way the system was really put together?
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
6 Mar
6 Mar
4:42 a.m.
On 3/4/20 1:15 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
found it in this MAC-16 ad
https://adspast.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=62927
Thanks, Al! Definitely it. Hopefully I'll make it back to the site at some
point and see if there are more related boards, although I think everything
that was left had been "decommissioned" and had the card edges snipped off
(which is the case for the diode-matrix ROM boot board that I snagged at
the same time)
6:01 a.m.
On 3/6/20 4:42 AM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Thanks, Al! Definitely it. Hopefully I'll make it
back to the site at some point and see if there are more related boards, although I think
everything that was left had been "decommissioned" and had the card edges
snipped off (which is the case for the diode-matrix ROM boot board
that I snagged at the same time)
considering how rare these boards are, even the goldbug snipped ones would be useful to
take pictures of
if there is ever a need for component ID or circuit tracing
2:29 p.m.
Don't forget Pluribus used the same boards. I think most of those were
finally scrapped in the late 90s. They had been repurposed after I
think it was Citibank dumped a lot of them.
bb
On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 9:28 AM Al Kossow via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 3/6/20 4:42 AM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Thanks, Al! Definitely it. Hopefully I'll
make it back to the site at some point and see if there are more related boards, although
I think
everything that was left had been "decommissioned" and had the card edges
snipped off (which is the case for the diode-matrix ROM boot board
that I snagged at the same time)
considering how rare these boards are, even the goldbug snipped ones would be useful to
take pictures of
if there is ever a need for component ID or circuit tracing
4 Mar
4 Mar
4:24 p.m.
On 3/3/2020 4:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a
clue what system this core board was from:
http://www.classiccmp.org/acornia/tmp/coresmall.jpg
The curved edge connectors (presumably to make board insertion easier)
are quite distinctive, plus the way the power's fed in via an edge
connector on the "far" side of the board. What's interesting to me is
the core ring size; the TTL ICs on the board have 1970 date codes, but
I didn't think that the rings got quite that small until right at the
end of core's era, more toward the end of the decade.
It seems to be 8 blocks of 64x64, i.e. 4KB. p/n on the main board of
2001000755, and just hidden from view under the core daughterboard is
a logo that says "LEC", which I suppose might be meaningful.
There's a bigger (2181x1863) image as "coreboard.jpg" in the same dir
if more detail helps (I doubt it), but it's 2.4MB so maybe save Jay's
bandwidth by only looking at that one if you absolutely have to :-)
thanks,
Jules
LEC was the Lockheed Electronics Company, Avionics and Industrial
Products Division, located in Los Angeles.? part number noted matches
their part numbering structure.? I have manuals for two of their devices
that were rack mountable core memory systems.? The CE-100 product
brochure described it as 4K, 8K, &16K words up to 36bits targeting small
and medium computer central memory.
Steve
1520
days inactive
1522
days old
17 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
bhilpert＠shaw.ca -
bobsmithofd＠gmail.com -
dkelvey＠hotmail.com -
elson＠pico-systems.com -
jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
linimon＠lonesome.com -
paulkoning＠comcast.net -
rickb＠bensene.com -
shumaker＠att.net