Interesting one for you. A PC Chips industrial controller board of some sort

Posted by danmoore2@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 22 comments

Can't find anything about it online. I've read they were used as industrial controllers.

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carl0071@reddit

Looks like an ISA PCMCIA interface, probably from an industrial PC or EPOS system.

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ladz@reddit

That pcmcia is probably for the teeny tiny hard disk. Those seemed amazing back then.

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PCMCIA was like a hot-swappable PCI bus for laptops. You could have just about any peripheral you can think of in the form of a PCMCIA card. I remember having a 3Com EtherLink network card which didn’t require a dongle; the RJ-45 port popped out the side and you inserted the network cable down into it.

I saw everything including TV tuner cards, video capture cards, FireWire, Creative Sound Blaster cards, modems, parallel port, serial, GPIB, memory card adapters, 3G (cellular) mobile broadband cards…

The only thing I’m not sure was whether there was ever a video/graphics card but there was a DVD decoder card available.

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Scoth42@reddit

Apparently there were at least four video cards in that form factor, one for PCMCIA based on the S3 Trio64V+, and three cardbus ones. A couple even support 3D. They would have displayed entirely to external monitors as far as I can tell.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=47417

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carl0071@reddit

Wow that’s impressive! I can imagine that would have cost a fortune at the time but would’ve given someone either a second external monitor (for a total of three inc the LCD) or a major graphics upgrade!

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ellicottvilleny@reddit

I used this board and many others like it as industrial controllers running DOS and custom software written by me in Turbo Pascal to control maxhinery.

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KurriHockey@reddit

How much would this have cost at that time?

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ellicottvilleny@reddit

Most of these would have been 300 and up for a bare board early on. Later on I remember XT class single boards, maybe not this exact model, went as low as 99 bucks. I dont remember the exact prices.

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KurriHockey@reddit

300, even in ~1990 dollars seems way to low. My 286 in 1990 was 2500+ etc. Unless this PC was late 90s? But then an 8086 class seems pretty underpowered

Interesting though !!

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ellicottvilleny@reddit

This is a single board 3” by 5” not a full PC. Your 286 motherboard cost 800 ish. An 8086 XT class CPU system on chip like this is way less powerful than even an 80286. Anyways industrial boards like this could have been a lot more than 300 bucks retail. I could buy this board wholesale.

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phire@reddit

This is a complete PC.

You can check the datasheet for the main SOC here: https://datasheets.chipdb.org/Chips/F8680_rev_1_1.pdf

It's roughly XT class. The CPU has the performance of a 286 (and is clocked at 14Mhz), but is limited to the instructions of an 8086. To the left of the PC/Chip, we have 32KB of Static RAM, and on the left we have a quite large ROM chip, maybe 128KB. Both are on an 8bit bus.

The two SIP chips above the PC/Chip are VRAM for the graphics, at 32KB for CGA compatible graphics. I also see the PC speaker and real-time-clock are hooked up.

That port along the bottom is a standard 8-bit ISA bus, conforming to the PC-104 standard.

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KurriHockey@reddit

Absolutely amazing response. Such a great read :)

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hamellr@reddit

A VERY close relative to this PC may or may not have been the guidance controller for a high earth orbit defense system that very definitely never existed.

It did not have ten megabytes of SIPP memory as the “hard drive” to survive launch into orbit. And it absolute did not have an ocean based component based on the same processor that help triangulate trajectories of random object that may have happened to be floating around in the sky.

Allegedly.

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Floatella@reddit

Food for thought.

Now let's get it running and play some Sopwith!

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Skycbs@reddit

Now I’m curious

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danmoore2@reddit (OP)

Wow thanks so much, that's an unnerving amount of accurate information on this little board lol!

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