2 Old INTEL boards with lots of nice chips

[johnorun]

I just got these:

There are 16 versions of Intel chips on this board. It's a 1981 vintage INTEL Multibus CPU card w. 32k multimodule RAM .

The 4 dark eproms in upper right are mysteriously painted black and have Intel id (D2732) info printed over the paint.
Other chips of note are a D8086 upper center and daughterboard, lower right, that has D2117-4 memory chips and a large ceramic D8202A.

Well, the small board above is from the early 1970's and is now the supreme board in my collection. I call this an Intel C3107 Memory Card with general purpose Static RAM, but there is no ID on the board. (The 80286 gold chip above it is shown for scale.)
It contains Gold with Gray Trace ceramic chips that are classified by the author of the "Vintage Intel Microchips Guide", George Phillips as being "off the scale rare....these are the first ones in the 'C' package with gray traces that have shown up...The type 'C' package variety of this chip was not even listed in my guide."



I will be offering one of these on Ebay in the near future.
Feel free to contact me if you are interested in one of these vintage ultra- rare chips for your collection.

[wepwawet]

did you desolder the right row?

[Chiefish]

Very nice John, They are sweet little chips, very good looking and clean.

[Elar]

The Multibus card is RPB-86 from Intel MDS Series III. RPB-86 seems to be same as iSBC 86/12A single board computer. Additonal memory card is iSBC 300 MULTIMODULE 32KB RAM.

[Guest]

[wepwawet]

to keep it as:
"Well, the small board above is from the early 1970's and is now the supreme board in my collection."
you should put them back where they were.

[debs3759]

I agree with wepwawet. If a board is almost unknown and has several of a chip that is considered rare and unknown, I would say that generally makes the board worth significantly more complete

[Chiefish]

I dont know after seeing the latest 4004 sales on ebay, while none were solder pulls, i have yet to see a board with the same chips on it going to that price range. I myself wouldnt want a whole board for my collection , just chips. But i think that comes down to the individual collector. If we used that theory than we should just collect the whole computers that the chips came in , so where would the line get drawn as far as keeping things intact?

[chip68]

As an electrical engineer, I like to keep the entire board intact whenever possible. It gives the chips some context. Otoh, my experience has been that if you're looking to make a profit, pulling the chips and selling them individually is likely to get you 3, 4, maybe 5 times what the board itself would bring. (Unless it happens to be something uniquely collectible on its own, like a SIM4 SBC.)

- CMW

[FDIV]

I love the hand drawn traces on the memory board. Paired with the gray trace chips it is very beautiful. I would never even think of de-soldering any board with hand drawn traces.

[Guest]

To Debs, Wepwawet and FDIV-
I appreciate the beauty and context of an intact vintage board as much as you all. Fortunately, I have two of these boards and I plan to put one in the vault and leave it intact.
According to George Phillips, these are the only examples of the C3107 RAM that have surfaced to date.

As Chip68 said, "pulling the chips and selling them individually is likely to get you 3, 4, maybe 5 times what the board itself would bring."
My purpose for removing chips from one of the boards is the financial need to recover the tidy cost I shelled out for both boards. I have sold or traded a few of them to fellow collectors this week and I'm happy to be able to share this rare item.

As a side note, these boards were destined to be sent to a scrap metal refiner. The 65 year old seller sadly told me that he had sold an entire old mainframe "White box" (containing these same C3107 cards!) to a metal scrapper for only $24 a few weeks ago, because he didn't have to time or energy to take it apart and list it piecemeal on Ebay.

He DID have a Twin to this same mainframe that he had already, years ago, disassembled and stored and this is the source of the rare C3107 cards that I have. He is now sorry he didn't know what he had when he parted with the 1st mainframe.

So, I guess it was it better for me to buy and save these rare chips from destruction and make some available, individually, to the chip collecting community, instead of letting them be sold for scrap metal recovery and destroyed forever.

[johnorun]

Oops, sorry--^my message above^ (Forgot to log in).