Comments on: Name that Ware August 2012

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:59:09 +0000

I used to work at IBM as a logic designer in the 70s and 80s. That card would be an 8W3H card in the vernacular. The pcb technology I used was up to 4 signal planes, 2 power planes and a wiring density of three lines/channel – where a channel is the gap between two square pads 0.1″ apart. I know the big CPUs used more signal planes. The connectors top and bottom were 0.125″ spacing since they were from a heritage of IBM SLT technology .. that spacing for the motherboard kind of stuck. The cards plugged into boards, the boards which carried up to 20 cards were put into gates, the gates into frames .. an elegant and consistent heirarchy for the design.

I used a number of IBM technologies in my time .. Dutchess was a low density TTL family gate array of about 100 gates per module. (one of those aluminium cans there). Golf extended to about 300 gates per module, Tango increased by another factor of three or so. There were separate product lines packaged in the same way for read-only memory and for random access memory. My machine designs used ESROS and CPROS, (read only store – using memory was a little too close to human for IBM), which reached about 72K or 144K bits. My favourite RAM was Concorde – I used the 8K x 9 modules (which consisted of four internal chips), a 200ns or so DRAM. For 1977 that wasn’t too shabby – I borrowed six modules for a 48K RAM card for an S100 machine at home .. I probably had ten times as much RAM as anyone else in their homebrew!

By: Tracy Hall

Tracy Hall — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:07:16 +0000

As I said, it’s really a hybrid: PCB for the holes and planes, but very thin wires machine channel routed between the pins, then sealed. Those “traces” are the wires. Like I said, I built a few short pre-production runs with these. No pins, true. wires “tacked” to the pads.

Since each was “custom built” (other than the interface/connector pins), you could make design changes rapidly; you could rework (cut the wires). Great stuff, at the time.

By: michael

michael — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:53:21 +0000

no, it is a pcb, I used to do solder rework on those in the mid 80s. no pins, no wires, ‘cept the printed ones.

if you look very carefully between the pads, you can see the traces.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:59:44 +0000

Three processors and seven ram chips, weird. I’d love to see the other side.

By: Ali Khurram

Ali Khurram — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:35:35 +0000

So at least I have found that I am not the only one in this universe who kept a similar board scavenged from a scrap yard (early 90′s) for such a long time to find from what machine it came from. I thought (in those days) that maybe it is from some IBM mainframe computer used for aerospace or military purpose.