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Fun and unique ISA cards....

L

lowen

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As a companion to the PCI card thread, what about unique and fun (where 'fun' can mean enjoyable or it can mean obnoxious!) ISA cards?

Here's a couple to start:
IMG_20240418_175953390_HDR.jpg
ISA Flash disk, 16 MB...

IMG_20240418_180126638.jpg
Proprietary telescope interface card. $dayjob still has three of these in production, with this one exhibiting some issues. More to follow....
 
lowen said:
Proprietary telescope interface card. $dayjob still has three of these in production, with this one exhibiting some issues. More to follow....
Click to expand...
I would love to hear more about this. Is this like one of those enormous room-sized telescopes?
 
Palantir (unrelated) was also a semi-popular word processor. But the big-fish-little-fish eating thing, I think Palantir, the OCR outfit was eaten by Calera, who was eaten in turn by Caere. But I could have that wrong--it's been too long remember the trivia.
 
I'm swimming in weird ISA cards. Among them is a Gilbarco multi-channel gas pump controller, at least two ISA-based tuner cards (one requiring the VESA Feature Connector, a PCMCIA to ISA bridge board both in single and dual slot and the VIP card for my Forte VFX1 which if you ignore the VR portion is the only ACCESS.bus card I've ever seen.

Edited: I have a pair of Mobius Technologies dual-port RS-232 cards that feature hardware encryption. They are full-length ISA cards that just appear as COM ports but you used a software package (that I've never seen) to access and load a key that let you make secure connections over the serial port. Most of the board is covered in a metal box that when removed releases a tamper switch and disconnects the battery, erasing the key.
 
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There was a robotics kit we used in elementary school I believe from Fischertechnik. It had an ISA I/O card, but we used LPT interface instead for stuff we did.

I have one unique ISA card, Olivetti SCSI controller, possibly the smallest 8 bit ISA SCSI ever.
 
Even
Zare said:
There was a robotics kit we used in elementary school I believe from Fischertechnik. It had an ISA I/O card, but we used LPT interface instead for stuff we did.

I have one unique ISA card, Olivetti SCSI controller, possibly the smallest 8 bit ISA SCSI ever.
Click to expand...
Even smaller than a ROM-less Seagate ST-01? Wow.
www.ebay.com

1986 Seagate ST01 BIOS 80040 V.1.7 IBM Hard Drive Controller Card Untested | eBay

Item is untested. I couldn't find any other info on it. Sold as unknown working condition - parts / repair / project. No testing done. Pics are of actual item(s).
www.ebay.com
 
^ same length, about 60% of the height. I'll take pictures/measurement later.
P.S. and it's not romless.
 
NeXT said:
Pretty sure Future Domain had an 8-bit SCSI card where it was one VLSI chip, a few jumpers and a 50 pin header.
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The NCR 53C400 LSI controller was a common one-chip solution for 8 bit ISA; the TI version is a not-quite-identical clone. The rest is mostly PCB artwork. Problem was that throughput really sucked; IIRC, these were also memory-mapped chips. You could get around that with external logic (cf. the Trantor T130).
 
Googling "Future Domain 8 bit SCSI" it's roughly the same size as the Seagate above.
 

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The Future Domain TMC-845 has no BIOS. It, like the cards using TI and NCR chips is memory-mapped I/O, so you still need an address range. The TMC-850 has the provision for a BIOS ROM, though many of those were shipped with that unpopulated (i.e. for CD-ROM or scanner usage).
 
ISA definitely lends itself more to bizarre creations. Not only was it the wild west back then but you could also still build something in your garage that was revolutionary.
 
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