Here’s the Ware for February 2025:

Thanks again to spida for contributing yet another guest ware! Hopefully this one is a smidge easier to guess compared to last month’s.

The ware for January 2025 is the Gavilan SC laptop motherboard. The Gavilan laptop is one of the first portable computer designs, announced in 1983, at a 2024-equivalent price of $12,400. However, the company only survived for one year, per Wikipedia:

Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed its initial shipment deadline of December 1983, with the first several dozen units shipping instead in April 1984. Early units were fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks. Mass production and sales did not commence until June 1984. By this point, a major distributor of the Gavilan computer had filed for bankruptcy and was forced to pulled out of their deal with Gavilan. In late 1984, Gavilan Computer Corporation themselves declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy with cash flow problems. The company ceased operations in 1985, having only shipped a few thousand units of the Gavilan SC.

The number of blue wires on the main board is pretty consistent with “fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks”, and the history of the company reads like a botched Kickstarter from 2010, except it happened in 1984.

I was a little surprised at how difficult it was to guess the nature of the ware. I think contestants were reasonably thrown off by the inclusion of the modem. That would be a pretty forward-thinking feature to be designed into a laptop mainboard back in 1984. It’s also puzzling why one would preferentially integrate the modem over say, the RAM/ROM on the mainboard: generally there is some bare minimum memory required for a system to even function, whereas a modem might benefit from modularity for e.g. SKU diversity and/or future-proofing against improvements in modem hardware.

That being said, the company didn’t survive. Perhaps it is due in part to poor integration decisions from the get-go, yet contestants were viewing the ware through the lens of good decision making. Personally, I have found some of the hardest wares to guess to be poorly designed wares, as the final form is a bad fit for the function.

After reading through the comment thread a couple of times, I find it too hard to assign any one person a clear winner. A shout-out to FETguy for the explanation of the crinkly solder mask: I think the SMOBC vs HASL answer is correct – turns out I probably knew the answer to this once upon a time, but I had forgotten it with old age. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a tie to break in the competition – I think none of the guesses got close enough for me to declare a winner, despite all the thoughtful commentary. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The ware for January 2025 is shown below.

Thanks to brimdavis for contributing this ware! …back in the day when you would get wares that had “blue wires” in them…

One thing I wonder about this ware is…where are the ROMs? Perhaps I’ll find out soon!

Happy year of the snake!

Update Feb 12 2025

Seems to be a stumper. Lots of good analysis, but …

There’s been some mention about seeing the back side of the board; brimdavis was kind enough to provide a nice image of that:

I like how there is a dashed white line for where a blue wire should go.

Also, apparently the “wrinkly” effect is due to a problem “back in the day” where solder wicks under the solder mask during wave soldering? I never got a definitive answer on what causes that, or why modern boards don’t seem to have that issue anymore. In case nobody can guess what this ware is, I’d accept a convincing answer for the wrinkly soldermask mystery as a “tie breaker”.

I’ll drop another hint – brimdavis sent me a contextual photo of the assembly, and the ROM, RAM, and video board plug in through the 42-pin connector just above the telephone line connection unit.

The ware for December 2024 is a 2mm pitch, 64×64 LED panel purchased from Evershine Opto Limited. Their sales part number is ES-P2-I, but the silkscreen says DCHY-P2-6464-1515-VP. The seller is just the name slapped on the box; like most commodity wares, there’s likely multiple channels offering the exact same make and model. So, I’ll accept any generic that more or less matches the spec as the winner.

As a matter of the “spirit” of the competition, my goal is to encourage thoughtful analysis, rather than “first to post”, so I will tend to award more insightful or accurate answers over quick answers. It’s a balance between rewarding “open discussion” versus “first to post”: I don’t want things to devolve into either a situation where nobody shares ideas out of fear that someone might riff off of their thoughts and win the prize; but I also don’t want a situation where folks are just throwing partial guesses at the wall to claim priority.

That being said, I had observed this would be an easy ware, which indicates priority to more insightful answers, not the first correct answer. To that end while “h” got the quickie out, Joe did produce a link to an exact match on the ware (which, significantly, is not what I get when I do an image search for the ware, although perhaps the results are geolocated). Meanwhile, Ian commented on some actual design features – an insight you wouldn’t get out of a rote image search.

In my mind, all three could be eligible for the prize in this case. I think if “h” had looped back and commented on some other design feature of the ware (doesn’t have to be lengthy – similar to Ian’s is sufficient), it would have been straightforward to give the prize to “h”. But because the ware was so easy to guess, the prize goes to Joe for producing an exact link (the part number, pixelated in the contest image, is an exact match!), as that took a little bit more research. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Tough one to judge, though; I suppose I asked for that by posting a relatively easy ware.

The ware for December 2024 is shown below.

This one should be a cakewalk, and I’m mostly sharing it because I had trouble searching for a recent example at an image quality sufficient to make out most of the part numbers. Maybe this can help someone else in a similar fix!

Warm wishes for a safe and happy new year to all!