Ford-Higgins Powerframe QBUS Docs

[Shoppa, Tim]

Wow, I thought I had seen every obscure third-party Q-bus and Unibus chassis and backplane through the 70's/80's/90's but I had never heard of "Ford Higgins Power Frame" until today.

It's a very stylized case obviously built around that disk drive but otherwise reminds me a lot of the DEC grey office-side boxes of the 80's. The only thing is that the ribs on the Ford-Higgins run up and down but the plastic ribs on the DEC stuff usually ran left to right so it's not obvious they were copying anything from DEC at the time, it seems likely the "Power Frame" predated the BA23/BA123/vaxstation styling.

A little corporate research shows that Ford/Higgins was a division of Century Data Systems. It must've been a last gasp, everything I've ever seen from Century Data was from the 70's.

Tim N3QE