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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
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Location: Australia
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 Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:15 pm Post subject: More peripheral boards |
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...continued from my last topic
CSS Labs TurboRAM with 4MB
I like the way the termination resistors are installed in unused sockets. These are removed when installing more RAM. |
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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
Posts: 1764
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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Stallion Technologies Brumby-4
I don't know much about this one as it appears to have been made by a short lived Australian company, but judging by the chips, interface, and patent number, this appears to be a type of terminal access card for their range of SCO Unix servers. The main chip is an Intel 188. |
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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
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Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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Aopen AX59 Pro
A Super 7 motherboard notable for having 2MB of L2/3 cache on board (most others had 512KB or 1MB) |
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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
Posts: 1764
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:29 pm Post subject: |
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Tseng Labs ET6000
In my opinion, the best 2D only PCI video card made. This one with the expansion RAM making it 4MB. While other manufacturers were starting to add 3D capabilities, Tseng focused on MPEG decoding functions. That dead-ended their otherwise nice products. |
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CPUShack
Joined: 16 Jun 2003
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Location: State of Jefferson, USA
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WFS2005
Joined: 13 Mar 2007
Posts: 1526
Location: HB China
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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Stallion Technologies Brumby-4.
It's called multi-function card, or multi serial port card.
It can provide multiple 232 serial ports. It is widely used in computers in banks, post offices and other places.
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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
Posts: 1764
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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| WFS2005 wrote: | Stallion Technologies Brumby-4.
It's called multi-function card, or multi serial port card.
It can provide multiple 232 serial ports. It is widely used in computers in banks, post offices and other places. |
It doesn't look RS232 to me. It contains parallel UARTs, a CPU, and a fair amount of RAM and ROM for the time. If it were a multi port serial card I'd expect to see serial GPIO chips and no processing or code on the card.
I suspect all this hardware is implementing a custom parallel protocol. The sort of thing that would be done with a single FPGA these days. |
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WFS2005
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CPUShack
Joined: 16 Jun 2003
Posts: 34259
Location: State of Jefferson, USA
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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Was pretty common for multi serial cards to have some onboard processing, they handed more then just RS232 protocols, so the onboard processing handled any needed conversions/translations.
THe big connectors would have a breakout cable to 4 DB9s usually (or other formats
Your Brumby-4 probably was a quad serial card made specifically for running those terminals over serial, common at the time
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cuttingedgecs
Joined: 08 Oct 2017
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Location: Australia
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 10:21 pm Post subject: |
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| That all seems reasonable. You could use those UARTs to emulate 8 pseudo serial ports, and according to the patent the processing and RAM is also used for buffering to free up the host CPU, with the on board RAM being accessible by both the on-board 188, and the host CPU via memory mapped IO. So the card wouldn't appear as a serial card to the server (which would need software to read from RAM addresses rather than IO ports), but could appear as an RS232 (etc) interface to each terminal. |
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CPUShack
Joined: 16 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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| cuttingedgecs wrote: | | That all seems reasonable. You could use those UARTs to emulate 8 pseudo serial ports, and according to the patent the processing and RAM is also used for buffering to free up the host CPU, with the on board RAM being accessible by both the on-board 188, and the host CPU via memory mapped IO. So the card wouldn't appear as a serial card to the server (which would need software to read from RAM addresses rather than IO ports), but could appear as an RS232 (etc) interface to each terminal. |
Exactly how they worked.
Similar designs were used a lot in the 80's and the early 90's for ISPs and BBSs
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