HP 21MX Ethernet/SCSI card?

[Eric Smith]

Johannes Thelen <johannesthelen at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I just got HP 2109 E-series which I bought from eBay last week. I was planning
> to make own tape emulator interface for it, but I found mystery card from it,

High-resolution photos or scans to allow identification of more of the
components
might help with figuring out the likely functionality provided.

Based on what can be seen, I doubt that the RJ45 is for Ethernet.

jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:
> the Symbios 53C710 near the connector has info that indicates that it may be
> an Symbios chip developed for HP for the HP 9000.

The 53C710 was a standard NCR/Symbios product, not something
custom-developed for the HP 9000. It was used in a lot of systems,
including PCs.  The 53C710 was introduced in 1992, so the design
of this card couldn't be any older than that.

HP made custom SCSI adapters of various sorts for some of their
machines that didn't natively support SCSI, for internal use only for
manufacturing, test, and repair of their SCSI disk drives. However,
I don't think this is one of them.

> This may be a card developed for the 2109 system by HP for a custom
> or limited run job.

That does seem somewhat likely. Development of new hardware as
standard products for the HP 1000 systems (previously HP 21xx, still
using 21xx part numbers) had nearly entirely stopped by the mid-1990s,
but a big customer could certain have gotten HP to design a custom
interface.