WTB Intel 7110 Bubble Memory Subsystem or Chipset

[Mark J. Blair]

I'm about to acquire a couple of 1980s-vintage military surplus AN/UGC-137A terminals (i.e., glass TTYs with some local message preparation and storage capabilities) which have a bubble memory subsystem. They use plug-in cartridges containing 256 kbytes of storage in the form of two Intel 7110 1 Mbit bubble memory chips and their 7242 formatter/sense amplifiers.

One of the cartridges contains the one and only copy of the terminals' firmware, which I believe they need to load up at each reboot. Naturally, extracting the contents of that irreplaceable cartridge for archival, and potential future emulation, is going to be a very high priority for me. I have a few different approaches in mind for accomplishing that. One approach would be to remove the two memory devices from the critical cartridge in order to dump their contents in an independent bubble memory subsystem.

With that in mind, I'd like to get my hands on a working Intel 7110 bubble memory subsystem, or the parts to build one myself (i.e., a complete 7110/7220/7230/7242/7250/7254 chipset that I could make a board around).

Might anybody here have what I need available for sale or trade? I might be able to use some arbitrary old computer or other device that has a subsystem based around the Intel 7110, or a development kit such as the Intel BPK-72, or a chipset to make my own board.

If I can't acquire or make the hardware to dump the memory chips outside of their native system, then I think my next option would be to passively snoop the host bus interface of the Intel 7220 controller I expect to find inside the terminals as they perform their initial firmware load, so that I can reconstruct the cartridge contents from the trace data.

The terminals were made by the Librascope division of Singer, and brochures can be found here:

http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/Product_Literature_files/Communications%20Terminal.pdf

http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/Product_Literature_files/SST.pdf

http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/Product_Literature_files/Bubble%20Memory%20Cartridge.pdf

I already have the critical cartridge in hand, and I posted some pictures of it on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/964578291767173120




-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/