gslick
Veteran Member
Back in June of 2018, Al asked about an eBay listing for a DEC 5015575-01 board on the cctalk list and wondered if it might be a DECserver 200 board. At the time someone else and myself suggested it was more likely a DECserver 100 board. I didn't have a DECserver 100 to open up to verify myself.
I was curious at the time why Al was asking, and I'm curious again now. I currently don't see any information specific to the DECserver 100 on Bitsavers, while there is for the 200, 300, and 500.
I can now confirm that a DEC 5015575-01 board is from a DECserver 100. I recently acquired one and opened it up to take a look at it. It was the filthiest piece of equipment I have ever opened. Had to completely strip the chassis and vacuum everything before I could get a good look at the PCB.
The eBay listing from 2018 is long gone to compare the photos there. In general the PCB matches the 5015575-01 photo in a Russian page I found back then, except that the date codes on the ICs are two years newer on mine (1986) and there aren't many rework wires on the PCB, but the AM7990DC LANCE is mounted on a riser board instead of on the main PCB. There are four PLS167 / 82S167 PLDs on the riser board so that was a non-trivial engineering rework.
The DECserver 100 cleaned up surprisingly well given how full of dirt it was. The power supply voltages looked good so I put it all back together and was glad to see it still works. I was able to get it to download and boot the PS0801ENG.SYS load image from a SIMH VAX, and then make LAT connections through it to the SIMH VAX from a serial terminal.
I dumped the two 27128 EPROMs, 235E5 and 236E5, if anyone is interested in those images and they aren't already archived somewhere. In the Russian page photo the EPROMs appear to be earlier 001E5 and 002E5 versions if I read those labels correctly.
I didn't take any scans of the DECserver 100 PCBs while I had it apart. If there is interest I could open it up again sometime and do so.
I was curious at the time why Al was asking, and I'm curious again now. I currently don't see any information specific to the DECserver 100 on Bitsavers, while there is for the 200, 300, and 500.
I can now confirm that a DEC 5015575-01 board is from a DECserver 100. I recently acquired one and opened it up to take a look at it. It was the filthiest piece of equipment I have ever opened. Had to completely strip the chassis and vacuum everything before I could get a good look at the PCB.
The eBay listing from 2018 is long gone to compare the photos there. In general the PCB matches the 5015575-01 photo in a Russian page I found back then, except that the date codes on the ICs are two years newer on mine (1986) and there aren't many rework wires on the PCB, but the AM7990DC LANCE is mounted on a riser board instead of on the main PCB. There are four PLS167 / 82S167 PLDs on the riser board so that was a non-trivial engineering rework.
The DECserver 100 cleaned up surprisingly well given how full of dirt it was. The power supply voltages looked good so I put it all back together and was glad to see it still works. I was able to get it to download and boot the PS0801ENG.SYS load image from a SIMH VAX, and then make LAT connections through it to the SIMH VAX from a serial terminal.
I dumped the two 27128 EPROMs, 235E5 and 236E5, if anyone is interested in those images and they aren't already archived somewhere. In the Russian page photo the EPROMs appear to be earlier 001E5 and 002E5 versions if I read those labels correctly.
I didn't take any scans of the DECserver 100 PCBs while I had it apart. If there is interest I could open it up again sometime and do so.