Mystery 1970 core board

Brent Hilpert bhilpert at shaw.ca
Tue Mar 3 21:32:56 CST 2020


On 2020-Mar-03, at 4:18 PM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
> Hopefully collective wisdom can help on this one - does anyone have a clue what system this core board was from: http://www.classiccmp.org/acornia/tmp/coresmall.jpg
> 
> The curved edge connectors (presumably to make board insertion easier) are quite distinctive, plus the way the power's fed in via an edge connector on the "far" side of the board. What's interesting to me is the core ring size; the TTL ICs on the board have 1970 date codes, but I didn't think that the rings got quite that small until right at the end of core's era, more toward the end of the decade.
> 
> It seems to be 8 blocks of 64x64, i.e. 4KB. p/n on the main board of 2001000755, and just hidden from view under the core daughterboard is a logo that says "LEC", which I suppose might be meaningful.
> 
> There's a bigger (2181x1863) image as "coreboard.jpg" in the same dir if more detail helps (I doubt it), but it's 2.4MB so maybe save Jay's bandwidth by only looking at that one if you absolutely have to :-)

Can't help with the system of origin, but a little observational analysis:

It looks to be 16 bits wide rather than 8, I think you'll find there's another 8 bit-arrays of cores on the underside of the planar-array daughter board.

The little upside-down module boards along the top would be the sense amplifiers, the circuitry along the right would be drivers for one end of the address lines for one axis. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be a complete module. It looks like the inhibit drivers and 3/4 of the address drivers would have been on another board.



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