Name that Ware, July 2019

The ware for July 2019 is shown below.

ISA, I say! Back in the day when all it took was a couple 7400 series chips to talk to a computer…now we use a small computer just to properly negotiate power before talking for real over standards like USB-C.

Thanks to Nava for contributing this ware, found at Akihabalast, “Akihabara final waste disposal site!”.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2019 at 2:50 am and is filed under name that ware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

12 Responses to “Name that Ware, July 2019”

  1. Ingo says:
    July 30, 2019 at 3:32 am

    16 in+16 out isolated I/O card with some limited IRQ capability (bottom left)

    Using three hex rotary switches for the I/O port is kinda neat =) I wonder if the test hooks on GND/SEL/IOR/IOW were standard or if someone added them later for troubleshooting.

  2. J. Peterson says:
    July 30, 2019 at 4:26 am

    Relay control board.

  3. Adam says:
    July 30, 2019 at 4:32 am

    ADTEK aISA-P21 16 DI/DO isolated board

    • FM says:
      July 30, 2019 at 3:06 pm

      I think this is the correct answer.

      • zebonaut says:
        July 30, 2019 at 5:39 pm

        I think it is correct that this is the correct answer ;-)

        BTW: I had never thought about this before, but yes: Of course you can nowadays buy USB-to-ISA interface adaptors. Yay! One more reason to not throw away ancient ISA cards.

  4. Tz says:
    July 30, 2019 at 5:23 am

    SCSI Adapter

  5. Daniel says:
    July 30, 2019 at 5:36 am

    I think this is one of the Contec I/O boards – 16 channel I/O similar to this one https://www.contec.com/products-services/daq-control/pc-helper/isa-card/pio-1616l(pc)v/support/#section

  6. Adrian says:
    July 30, 2019 at 5:45 am

    Proprietary card to drive a CNC or Pick & Place machine from a PC.

  7. Daniel says:
    July 30, 2019 at 5:47 am

    I don’t think it’s this exact model but here is the instruction manual: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/31726053/pio-16-16lpcv

    Opto-Isolated 16 channel I/O board presumably used for some form of industrial automation?

    Some notes:
    – the connector is a chunky 37 pins – that’s a seriously large cable… the part number pcb37P gives an idea
    – I/O address is set via the 3 dials SW1/SW2/SW3
    – interrupt is configured by jumpering bottom left jumpers
    – 2 of the input signals can be routed to trigger an interrupt

    The sample C program on the last page of the manual is fairly minimal. Read/write directly to I/O address – no protected memory!

    • carl says:
      July 31, 2019 at 4:36 am

      If I recall, the MS C compiler had a ?macro?function call? to issue INP and OUTP instructions to talk to the Intel I/O port space. With DOS as a real mode “OS”, an ordinary program could use dangerous instructions to read/write directly from/to hardware. Any real OS will immediately fault any program that does such bad things. A lot of (bad) device drivers were written to avoid this safety measure.
      Also, in the Bad Old Days, some goofy programmers used the Parallel Port as a bootleg I/O device. Later versions of the hardware were bidirectional, an could actually read and write byte wide, with an extra nibble for handshake.
      Today a lot of Pie boards are being sold to replace this board. The GPIO pins act like this thing did.

  8. Samsungirex India says:
    July 30, 2019 at 2:58 pm

    Today’s modern computer name is microprocessor is it true?

  9. Bunnie’s blog: Name that Ware, July 2019 #VintageComputing #RetroComputing #IBMPC @bunniestudios « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! says:
    August 2, 2019 at 9:57 pm

    […] won’t spoil the fun, you can read Bunnie’s post here and the subsequent post on correctly guessed […]