The Ware for April 2007 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

My apologies for the lateness of this Ware. I’m in in Shenzhen again, bringing up the production line for Chumbys. The fact that this post is so late is an indication that I don’t have a lot of time out here to shop for wares and post them–but I finally got a chance to go to Luo Hu this weekend and find something that I thought was just entertaining to take apart.

Bonus points to anyone who can correctly guess how much I paid for this Ware (and even more points to someone who can tell me what I should have paid for this Ware based on a BOM analysis–you have to haggle for everything in Luo Hu).

I have a lot of stories from out here, but unfortunately most of them I can’t tell until the Chumby hardware is launched (which is imminent). I’m definitely learning more about this country on my extended stay out here, and when people say they have scars to show for bringing up a product in China, trust that they mean it. It’s been no cakewalk, not to mention I miss my friends and my home terribly, but I’ve been trying to make the best of it out here. I’ll share a few quips and anecdotes in the next post of things that I probably can talk about.

The winner of Name that Ware March 2007 is bdb! Impressive work, and congratulations. The board is in fact SN001 of a ChaosNet adapter–one of the direct ancestors of the ubiquitous Ethernet. It’s from a Perkin-Elmers 3230 computer. Needless to say, this is a personal treasure of mine, a small piece of history that I can call my own.

While some ChaosNet adapters were deployed in Symbolics LISP machines, I was specifically looking for someone to identify it as a ChaosNet adapter (so John Peterson was very close, but bdb nailed it right on). Congratulations again!

The Ware for March 2007 is shown below. Click on the picture for a much larger image.

I will be seriously impressed by anyone who can get this one. This was rescued from a discard pile at MIT back when I visited as a pre-frosh in 1992. I wasn’t too big on the campus tours–they were so boring and always showed you the stuff they wanted you to see anyways–so I went out on my own and nosed my way into every EE-related building, sticking my head into labs, offices and lectures unannounced. I eventually wound my way to the Media Lab and naturally I gravitated toward the machine room and let myself in, and found this in a pile of boards to be discarded. The guy there was friendly, told me what it was, and let me take it home and it’s been a prized posession since. It’s not a prototype board; from my understand this was used in a “production” machine. Back then it wasn’t so uncommon to see wire-wrap in a production machine! There’s still an old Symbolics machine hanging out at CSAIL somewhere, I think, that was wirewrapped.

Thanks to everyone who played last month’s Name that Ware. There’s a certain satisfying sense of closure in discovering the origin of an old ware you’ve had in your closet for a long time. It’s even neater to know that I had something as classic as a board from a PDP-11 hanging above my desk when I was a kid, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

It’s a hard choice to pick one winner, so I’m going to pick two: Nicholas and Phil, congratulations! email me to claim your prize. The link to the bitsavers page in particular is really neat; I’m bookmarking that one. I’m glad that someone is going around collecting all the schematics and code that ran on these classic machines, and I’m even more glad that I haven’t heard of any lawsuits from copyright holders trying to milk the last dime out of some dead documents. I guess the sad part is that I don’t really see a bitsavers happening for any of today’s machines or chips. I wonder if in twenty years we’ll look back at these funny old Pentium chips and simply shrug our shoulders and go, oh well.

The ware for February, 2007 is shown below. Click on the picture for a much larger version.

I have had this ware since I was a wee lad, since I was probably just over a decade old, but to this day I don’t know what it does. I used to hang it over my Apple ][ in the basement where I would hack late into the night, writing assembly and BASIC code to control little hand-built robots and voice synthesizer cards. Clearly, the ware is from a DEC machine of some type, but I don’t know which one or what it does. I figured maybe this would be the right place to get answers to such mysteries from my youth, so here it is! Hopefully someone will be able to tell me what this relic did.