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.
That’s impressive! Definitely a work of art! Wow…
If I had to guess, I would say it was out of a LISP machine (like a Symbolics machine – like you said) simply since, those are the only machines of that era that would have wirewrapped prototypes hanging around MIT.
And wow, is that SN001!!! Wow.
So I see a sticker that says “Bad May 1985”. I also see the sticker which says “R”. Maybe that’s a bus… From the CADR schematics, the only things that are on the R bus are the shifter and the masker.
So, my guess is a shifter and/or masker from a CADR, LM-2, or LMI machine.
Didn’t you sort of give it away? I would (off top of head) guess one of the early lisp machines, like the previous poster said. I remember seeing a Symbolics 3600 in the 80’s, it was a mix of big wirewrap boards and regular PCBs for more generic stuff like memory. Much of the early classic Evans & Sutherland gear (frame buffers, PS300) was also wire-wrap.
The cables on the right side say “peripheral controller” to me (disk, maybe?)
See this link:
http://www.digibarn.com/stories/dankottke/index.htm
for photos of the first (well, #5) Macintosh done in wire-wrap.
It’s definitely not from a Lisp machine. :-) You’re closer with the Evans and Sutherland gear…
The chip numbers aren’t particularly clear, but it almost seems like its either some kind of memory/SRAM for some random thing. Specifically? No idea.
I would justify that because of there are a number of 74S74 flip-flops present.. and also a number of decoders/multiplexers are present in different locations too.
Actually, since it looks so crazy, I’d bet that maybe its some kind of register expansion for a mainframe or minicomputer…
This is a particularly awesome piece of hardware, but it’s pretty hard to guess, so I’m just gonna say it in plaintext… (honestly, I needed google for help… :)). It’s the logic unit from a CHAOSnet adapter. Wikipedia has a page about the history of CHAOSnet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet, and there’s a bunch of files on the web rescued from an old MIT box which actually have a very, very detailed description (including wire wrap instructions!) for a similar, but not identical card here: http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html
I’ve mirrored the huge tar file and extracted the interesting bits about this card here: http://www.strangecargo.org/~bdb/chaos/
One of my favorite parts of that archive is the cabling map which describes the actual network built around MIT, including the Albany Street garage (site of the MIT Flea).
Early RAID card from a CM-1 or CM-2?
considering the looks of the board, and the similarity to what’s shown here ( http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xeroxdolphin/index.html ), I’d say this is a board from one of the Xerox D series of machines.
This looks similar. Its an interface card from a lisp machine.
http://www.strangecargo.org/~bdb/chaos/quad.uml