On Thu, 11 May 2000, Carlos Murillo wrote:
At 02:17 PM 5/11/00 -0500, Joe wrote:
>Today,
I was given a bunch of interesting vintage items.
> HP 88396 SCSI to parrallel interface.
Did you ever find out more about this?
I just picked up one of one yesterday with the cables. The other end of
the cable that fits the DB-25 connector has a male Centronics style
connector on it. The SCSI port has a feed-through type terminator on it.
Attached to that is a cable that has a micro-SCSI connector on the other
end of it. FWIW the box says "same functionality as 88395".
Joe
I also have an 88395. It has been a puzzle for me. The enclosure
is the same of such HPIL gadgets as the 82164 and 82165. However,
the power supply connector is different; mine in fact had a big
wart xformer attached made by AT&T and rated 20VAC, 2A, and marked
"security isolation transformer".
Carlos, if the wart is at the end of the mains cable, and the
application unit cable ends up in a 4-pin thing that looks like the head
of an old putter, it is a twin to one that I have that runs an HP
Deskjet printer. The output is 20VAC center-tapped.
- don
Inside, there is an MC68B09FN uController, an NCR SCSI
chip,
an MB8464-15 static ram, a 28 pin ROM, bridge+filter+regulator,
and finally, what seems like too much glue logic (14 chips) near
the parallel port. In particular, there is a 20 pin quad (TI 901FF)
somewhere between the data bus and the paralell port. Perhaps
some clocked parallel I/O? or a FIFO? Seems to me that they were
trying to increase the speed of the parallel port to meet that of the
SCSI chip at the other end. The chips were all manufactured in '88 or
before, so I'd say this was built in '89 . This was a device
designed to provide SCSI connectivity to something that had parallel
ports and no easy way of adding other cards; I don't think that it
was intended for Vectras. I suspect that this was designed to
give the HPIB-based 9000-300 systems (which had a parallel port) the
opportunity to talk to SCSI tape drives, perhaps even HD's (though
not for boot devices, I'm sure). 1989 is about the right time;
it was then that it became clear that HPIB hard disks were a dead end.
carlos