Fun and unique ISA cards....

[lowen]

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.

And that's a great segue to the most fun ISA cards I've ever had, and I've had several of this kind. First kind:



The second kind, similar in function, were wire wrap panels.... don't have any blank ones of those left, unfortunately.

 

[lowen]

....but I do have a pair of populated ones....wrap side on top, component side on bottom....

(Yes, that's a pair of SGI O2's underneath....one works, the other doesn't)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

And that's a great segue to the most fun ISA cards I've ever had, and I've had several of this kind. First kind

You could actually still buy these at my local Fry's Electronics right before the closed. My Fry's even still had some ISA peripheral cards on the shelves, I didnt appreciate how awesome that was at the time. I miss electronics stores.

 

[Chuck(G)]

My preference was for the JDR prototype cards, which included address decoding logic. Made it relatively simple to implement something. Still have a few blank ISA prototype cards; probably will never use them.
I still occasionally prototype things using wirewrap, but drill my own blank boards and use the push-in socket pins. Can look quite neat for a one-off.
Of course, ISA wirewrap is peanuts compared to some of the large triple Eurocard WW boards and others. Still have a few that I occasionally harvest pins from.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

In a sense, things are the same, except now you get to struggle with USB or WiFi or BlueTooth... Cards are so yesterday...

I would wager it is A LOT harder to physicaly build something that interfaces with a PC over USB than it was to build an ISA card back in the day. Interfacing over wifi or bluetooth doesn't count since you've effectively got to build a second, smaller, simpler computer to do the job.

Of course, ISA wirewrap is peanuts compared to some of the large triple Eurocard WW boards and others. Still have a few that I occasionally harvest pins from.

Can you post a picture of one of these? Sounds cool.

 

[lowen]

I would wager it is A LOT harder to physicaly build something that interfaces with a PC over USB than it was to build an ISA card back in the day. .

If you do the hard work it is, but there are chips and modules for that now.

For instance: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

GPIO, I2C, SPI: those cover the use cases.

 

[Zare]

You can still work with 8 bit ISA, there are prototyping cards available from many vendors, I got mine from Texelec.

I mean there is still heavy lifting to do if you want to make an ISA adapter, there is more than one way to do it, and if you want full speed support it's going to be several of ICs there just for the interfacing. And there is no automagic option - as far as I know, nobody is selling an interfacable prototype card, as in breadboard + full bus logic.

For USB you have magic options such as MCU lowen linked to, or you can do the USB interface manually via dedicated chips. I presume even in that case you're looking at a lower number of electrical connections than with ISA card and bus chips.

I would wager it is A LOT harder to physicaly build something that interfaces with a PC over USB than it was to build an ISA card back in the day. Interfacing over wifi or bluetooth doesn't count since you've effectively got to build a second, smaller, simpler computer to do the job.

Depends on what you're doing. For DIY "space" I think it's opposite. It's quite easy to make a piece of electronic connected via MCU/USB to modern computer. Way, way easier than with ISA PC. You'll have problems and debugging in the development and both are quite hard to do with ISA, electrical and software malfunction will lock up and might even damage the machine. With ISA bus logic you have plugged in a whole electrical circuit to the computer. The way those components form the circuit might present an anomaly to the logic part of the equation, current drop somewhere messing with your logic levels, etc.

If you don't have to deal with signalling part and use a proxy interface that's 100% correct in signalling all the time and just carries your data around, you can concentrate on whatever you really want to do.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'll agree that navigating through the USB spec is not for the faint of heart, much less writing descriptors for anything but the simplest of devices, but there are libraries for that.