Name that Ware, February 2016

The Ware for February 2016 is shown below.

I couldn’t bring myself to blemish this beautiful ware by pixelating all of the part numbers necessary to make this month’s game a real challenge. Instead, I just relied upon a strategic cropping to remove the make and model number from the lower left corner of the board.

Remember the TMS4464? Yah, back when TI’s thing was making DRAM, not voltage regulators, and when Foxconn made connectors, not iPhones. Somewhere along the way, some business guy coined the term “pivot” to describe such changes in business models.

Thanks to Michael Steil for sharing this beautiful piece of history with me at 32C3!

15 Responses to “Name that Ware, February 2016”

  1. Commodore 65: http://vintagecomputer.com/commodore-65.html
    Too easy with all the logos and named sockets ;)

    Greetings from Clementi!

  2. Jacob Barss-Bailey says:

    A Commodore 65 prototype!

  3. Jacob says:

    Commodore 65?

  4. Phil says:

    Definitely a C65, Victor and Bill gave it away.

  5. Ingo says:

    It’s obvious just from the thumbnail that it’s a Commodore 65. Since there are two labelled chips (U11 and U3) below the Sanyo SRAM and based on the ROM revision I would guess that it’s a revision 2B board.

    The gold fingers of the user port look completely scratch-free in this picture, I wonder if Commodore even bothered to test all of the ports of these prototypes?

  6. wrm says:

    Even I knew Victor and Bill meant Commodore and Wiki did the rest.

  7. @f4grx says:

    victor, bill and elmer -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_65

    I did NOT look at the comments before posting, I could have found it YAY \o/

  8. pir says:

    Bah, one I got easily… so of course several other people have already.

    The Commodore logos on the chips made it pretty obvious.

    http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/c65.html

  9. kodabar says:

    Uh, what can I do to have a guess, yet differentiate myself from all the others who’ve already identified it?

    Well, I can’t just say it’s a Commodore 65 or even that it’s a 64 DX. Someone else has even ventured the revision 2B thing.

    Uh.. uh… well I think all I can do is try to guess the serial number. I’m going to guess that it’s #000071 Wouldn’t it be astonishing if I was right?

  10. J. Peterson says:

    So with the ware figured out, I stared surfing the date codes. Looks like it rolled off the line in early ’91. Some of those parts sat in inventory for over two years.

    Making ASICs for such a small run must’ve been a pretty serious $$ loss.

  11. Carl Smith says:

    I like how some of the capacitors near the back panel connector just left of top center have reference designators of EMI133, EMI125, etc. And according to Wikipedia, the “Bill” and “Victor” names were not names for the chips. The names were “to let others in the organization know whom to go to for advice on the chips.”

  12. Jeffrey Ozanne says:

    It is a Commodore C64 DX REV 2B board? Those are going for tons of money.

  13. taha says:

    Hello
    How can I get some information about robot making in detail and would like to get assistance to make one for my final project.

  14. tbsbet says:

    So with the ware figured out, I stared surfing the date codes. Looks like it rolled off the line in early ’91. Some of those parts sat in inventory for over two years.

  15. gclub says:

    Looks like a PCB feedback around an electric bicycle motor.
    So bad I opened some recently, and they really match that…
    A temp + a hall sensor look ok there, plus some connectors on the back.
    @fr4grx: Spotted you here !