HP 1000 A class series boards

[Glen Slick]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 6:50 PM Guy Dunphy via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> At the moment I'm not sure if my machine is an 'A-series' or not. How do I tell?
> It's a 2113E, apparently quite a late model. I've had it and related hardware (minus disk drives)
> since the early 2000's. It was a junkyard find. All in perfect condition except one of the two
> tape drives has a little 'forklift damage' to the front. I rescued it all from being landfilled.

A 2113E is a 21MX E-Series.
http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=109

A 2117F is a 21MX F-Series and looks identical, except for the color
of the highlight stripe across the front panel, plus it should also be
cabled to the floating point processor box. Internally it also has
different firmware PROMs than the 2113E to use the floating point
processor box.
http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=110

Both the 2113E and 2117F have a large PCB mounted horizontally along
the bottom of the chassis which implements the CPU core. Memory boards
plug into the vertically mounted backplane from the front the chassis
behind the front panel, and I/O boards plug into a separate vertically
mounted backplane from the rear of the chassis. The memory and I/O
boards are basically square, with single card edge connector that is
almost the whole width of the card that plugs into the backplanes. The
card edge connectors on the side opposite the backplane vary from
board to board.

If it has a front panel with switches and lights it is not an
A-series. None of the A-series A400, A600/600+, A700, A900, A990 have
front panels with switches and lights. Instead they have a VCP
"Virtual Control Panel" console interface. The A-Series CPU, memory,
and I/O boards are rectangular, and have two card edge connectors that
plug into the backplane (except the A900 CPU board set, which uses
pin-and-socket connectors only for the CPU board set). There is only a
single backplane in an A-Series chassis that all of the CPU, memory,
and I/O boards plug into. The A400 and A990 CPUs are single board, the
A600/600+ is two boards for CPU and memory controller, the A700 is
three or four boards for lower and upper CPU, memory controller, and
optional FPP, the A900 is four boards for sequencer, data path, cache
controller, and memory controller.