The Ware for June 2026 is shown below:
This board is from my personal collection of “favorite boards” that I’ve collected over the years. A lot of old memories associated this one – both figuratively and literally.
I’ve received some feedback that gmail in particular is marking my email updates as spam. Not sure I have a good way to fix this yet, as the blog is also under heavy attack from automated AI spammers at the same time (to the tune of several thousand requests a day).
You’ll notice that the blog has no ads, so I also have no budget for moderation, paid mailers, or fancy anti-spam tools. I’ll noodle on a durable solution to this problem in my copious spare time, but for now, if you’re not receiving the email updates, please try to convince Google this is not spam by marking it as ham in your inbox. Yes, have also received feedback that this is ineffective and that “the way” is to pay a service that specializes in sending spam *ahem* marketing emails, but see my previous comment about this being a lean, ad-free blog. But, maybe if enough readers mark the emails as not spam, “The Algorithm” might be convinced people actually wanted the updates they signed up for?
That’s a shame about the spam filtering, it’s frustrating when it happens like that. I’ve had similar issues with Gmail before.
I’ve seen that metal chassis on old school Cisco routers/switches, but the lack of ethernet ports baffles me. Maybe some sort of VoIP digital processing card for a modular chassis?
Best I can tell it’s a 9U VME card from the 3 connectors on the right side. I couldn’t identify the obviously high bandwidth ruggedized metal connector on the left (could be a predecessor to Amphenol’s Cool Edge or a custom variant), but the other one is labeled 3M 3372 which is used for a bunch of different things so not much help. All the rectangular chips surrounding the VLSI chips are DRAM as best I can tell. The VLSI chips themselves are hard to guess at since I’m not familiar with them, but the date code puts them being produced in mid-1996, if I’m reading it right, which lines up nicely with the VME guess.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s a VME card used to expose a high speed interconnect to other equipment, possibly a VMEBus bridge card to connect 2 VME chassis.
For what it’s worth, “the way” to actually address gmail deliverability issues is Postmaster Tools (postmaster.google.com)
Often it comes down to misconfigured / missing DKIM or similar.
Anubis is the canonical solution to the site scrapper issue; https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/
First time i try to guess… and not much found, how frustrating.
It’s clearly an industrial card, I agree with the 1996 timeline. A very lot of ASIC (“VLSI”) with lot(4) ram chips each. I can’t see any crystal, and there’s obviously no cpu/mcu.
So my conclusion so far is “some specialized intensive/parallel computation card”. Could be anything really. Can’t find any more clue :/
I’m from Telecom, and it doesn’t seem telecom to me, so I suppose something related to video. Referring Bunnie’s “memories” attached to the board, and linking this to his love of hardcore hardware manufacturing, I hypothesize some inspection tool for electronic manufacturing. Maybe wafer inspection ?
Looks like an SGI RM6-64 raster master. That where some nice graphics machines I could only dream of with my little SUN with CG6 frame buffer…
OMG, that’s what i was looking for. I looked at it and i had the InfiniteReality2 boardset in mind, but it did not have the proper connectors. That’s an original Onyx RM board.
I agree with Chrisian on the SGI raster master. I found a image here: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/simonpigot/rm6-64.jpg
According to http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/simonpigot/OnyxRealityEngine2.html it contains as follows:
RM6-64 – Raster Manager with 64Mb TRAM and 80Mb framebuffer memory. Contains: (a) the frame buffer memory and 20 custom processors (known as IMPs) for scan conversion, multisample anti-aliasing etc (b) texture memory and texture processors for perspective correction and mipmap ops.
The incidental details (grid letters and lines, designators, layer numbering, VME-style DIN 41612 backplane connectors and FCI Metral power headers, yellow barcode label and stick-on revision label) are all characteristic of Silicon Graphics’ ASD machines, which stood for Advanced Systems Division. The desktop machines came from a different division (the Entry Systems Division or ESD) that used a different “house style”. They had some overlap, with one generation of desktop machines (Octane) using mostly the same form-factor as the large system (Onyx2) for peripheral cards (XIO over a palladium-coated silver dendrite compression connector, which proved to be a bad idea, possibly coming from Cray Research?). Only the board locking mechanism differed.
Christian has the correct part (it is marked 030-0684-004 on the board). This was from an Onyx InfiniteReality system, circa 1996.
There is a bypass cap missing in the corner!
They were designed around a fixed graphics pipeline, where one board called the “Geometry Engine” (GE) does triangle and vertex setup using floating point units; in the InfiniteReality there were 4 custom processors (GE12) for this. This is also where the host interface buffers and OpenGL microcode are implemented. The screen coordinates of the vertexes are then sent over a link to one or several Raster Managers (RM) that perform texture mapping, subsampling, and blending in RGBA space. One interesting detail is that they support 16 bits per color component to eliminate visible banding. The pixel fill rate can be increased by adding more RM boards up to a max of 4. The RGB pixel output goes to a final Display Generator (DG) board that runs the sync programs to split the screen into up to 8 output channels and convert them to analog RGB.
This type of system was used for visualization, but also for real-time simulators like the ones used to qualify pilots on commercial aircraft. Each output channel could drive its own video projector for 180° cockpit coverage, and the RMs also have a dedicated output for “calligraphic displays” (ultra-bright light projectors using mirror galvonometers for simulating runway lights, etc). The upper front connector is for a paddle board for the RGB pixel bus from the RM(s) to the DG. The lower front connector is for calligraphic projectors.
Some more details: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/ir_techreport.html
Obviously not everyone will wants to add another service or system to their life, but RSS is the only reliable way I’ve seen to guarantee a reader gets every article.
Do the emails and blog have the same content?
One thing that might help without adding much cost is setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC if they aren’t already configured, as they can improve email deliverability. You could also ask subscribers to add your email address to their contacts, which often helps keep future updates out of the spam folder. Hopefully that, along with readers marking the emails as “Not Spam,” will make a noticeable difference over time.