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What is this? Post Photos of Mystery Items Here (vintage computers only)

VERAULT said:
In the book they mention buying Two Crays.... And then made the point "Who the hell buys TWO Crays?! What are they doing on that Island?"

Yeah I love the movie,, but the Book was so much better. Big Chrichton fan. Shame what they did to the movie Sphere. That was my favorite Crichton Novel. Maybe there is hope for a Micro movie.... but probably not in todays hollyweird.
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Buying two Crays would be total cray cray. :)
 
bburley said:
After I thought of tossing it, I at least should look inside.
I guess that blob (of epoxy?) is saying "so you want to reverse engineer it, do you?"
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A slightly less sophisticated dongle. Anyone else remember what this was from?

superhightechdongle.jpg

C-64 Golf Game - plugged into the cassette port
 
Looks like a dongle for Leaderboard for the c64, connects to the cassette port.

Stolen from Lemon64

The value is 2.2 ohms, Red, Red, Gold, I have an original dongle and that is the value on mine. There are 2 types as well, pins 1 & 6 connected and pins 5 & 6 connected, either seem to work for all versions of Leader Board. It's also been noted that you can just short the pins out by using a piece of wire and that works too making the resistor optional.
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I picked up a box of boards recently and I'm hoping someone here might recognize some of them. One of the boards seems to be some type of single board computer or maybe some type of microcontroller board. It have slots for two memory boards. The cpu is a CDP1802 and it has quite a few other RCA ics as well. No, I have not dumped the ROM, I'm not sure that the ROM or the other small board goes with the main cpu boards. Some of the board look etched by hand. Please take a look and let me know your thoughts.
 

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mountainking said:
I'm not sure that the ROM or the other small board goes with the main cpu boards.
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The small board in the third photo is a stand-alone SBC: it has a crystal resonator for the clock, an 1802 CPU, an NEC D446C 2Kx8 static RAM, the ROM, and the CDP1852 is a byte-wide I/O port.

I'm not sure about the other small board. The MC14517 is a dual 64-bit shift register. There's no CPU or anything on the board, so it's clearly some sort of peripheral.
 
cjs said:
The small board in the third photo is a stand-alone SBC: it has a crystal resonator for the clock, an 1802 CPU, an NEC D446C 2Kx8 static RAM, the ROM, and the CDP1852 is a 6 I/O port.

I'm not
sure about the other small board. The MC14517 is a dual 64-bit shift register. There's no CPU or anything on the board, so it's clearly some sort of peripheral.

Interesting, I didn't even consider that that small board could be a standalone SBC, I didn't think it had what is required for it
to qualify as a computer.
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Interesting, I didn't realize that board had everything required for it to qualify a computer.
 
cjs said:
The small board in the third photo is a stand-alone SBC: it has a crystal resonator for the clock, an 1802 CPU, an NEC D446C 2Kx8 static RAM, the ROM, and the CDP1852 is a byte-wide I/O port.

I'm not sure about the other small board. The MC14517 is a dual 64-bit shift register. There's no CPU or anything on the board, so it's clearly some sort of peripheral.
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So included in this lot of boards were multiples of the same boards I posted pics of and looking them over last I noticed that one of the other "copies" of the large board had wires that connect from the board and terminate at a female header connector that matches perfectly with the male header on that other small board, the one with the MC14517, so we now know that it does belong with with the large, "motherboard", for what it's worth.
 
That's the CDP1802 cpu that I mentioned was on the large board. If there are any other ics who's markings are difficult to read please lmk.
 
mountainking said:
That's the CDP1802 cpu that I mentioned was on the large board. If there are any other ics who's markings are difficult to read please lmk.
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I really haven't given it a thorough investigation and I'm not sure how valuable it would be if I did. I am just wondering where the hex keypad (or some input) and 7-seg display (or some output) are. I always seem to see those on 1802 boards - am I just not seeing them?
 
syzygy said:
I really haven't given it a thorough investigation and I'm not sure how valuable it would be if I did. I am just wondering where the hex keypad (or some input) and 7-seg display (or some output) are. I always seem to see those on 1802 boards - am I just not seeing them?
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Well, this lot came from a massive collection of various electronic junque that's from the estate of a designer/engineer so there certainly could be missing pieces that were intended to be used with these boards. Really, the reason why I made this post is that I thought the main, large motherboard might be a board that someone would recognize, maybe some mail order SBC or something. Unfortunately the only marking on the pcb is "CONDOR".

I collect homebrew type of stuff like this is for its historic value and because I, being an electronic technician/designer myself, admire others work and owning pieces like these boards is like having a window that I can look through into the past so while it's great when I can figure out what something is supposed to do or even get it up and running its not the main reason that I collect.
 
mountainking said:
Well, this lot came from a massive collection of various electronic junque that's from the estate of a designer/engineer so there certainly could be missing pieces that were intended to be used with these boards. Really, the reason why I made this post is that I thought the main, large motherboard might be a board that someone would recognize, maybe some mail order SBC or something. Unfortunately the only marking on the pcb is "CONDOR".

I collect homebrew type of stuff like this is for its historic value and because I, being an electronic technician/designer myself, admire others work and owning pieces like these boards is like having a window that I can look through into the past so while it's great when I can figure out what something is supposed to do or even get it up and running its not the main reason that I collect.
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Agree. It is very cool. I did notice "condor' but found nothing useful. It does not strike me as the typical Trainer, of which there are many. Given that you have duplicate sets, it does seem like these were for a specific, and maybe dedicated, purpose, but I don't know.
 
syzygy said:
Agree. It is very cool. I did notice "condor' but found nothing useful. It does not strike me as the typical Trainer, of which there are many. Given that you have duplicate sets, it does seem like these were for a specific, and maybe dedicated, purpose, but I don't know.
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Well, I do believe that the engineer, from what little I was told about him, was someone who spent his life designing, researching and experimenting with electronics for a handful of different companies/organizations and apparently even held a patent or two for his designs, so yes, I would think that this is all just stuff that he designed and built/made by hand himself BUT it's the "CONDOR" and "COMPONENT SIDE" markings that made me think otherwise since it doesn't seem to make sense to me that he would bother putting something like that on the pcb, rather the pcb was manufactured but another company and he simply ordered abunch of them because the circuit did when he needed and it was easier to buy them then make them, plus the traces on motherboard and the accompanying memory boards straight and don't look hand etched, where as the two smaller boards are definitely hand etched as the traces are all curved, the boards are single sided, there is no markings made from etched material and they just look hand etched. I feel like the motherboards are actually some kind of general purpose computer and the reason why they don't have rom on the board is because they weren't designed for a particular purpose. We'll probably never know.....
 
The 4th board looks home-made to me. The Condor board could be a professionally manufactured board for sure. There could certainly be a mixture.

I see several Condor named companies relate to computers and PCB manufacturing to some extent, eg here and here. Have you done a deep search on the researcher/designer? It could give you some clues. One of the boards is marke as modified 2/09 so there could still be much in the archives available.
 
syzygy said:
The 4th board looks home-made to me. The Condor board could be a professionally manufactured board for sure. There could certainly be a mixture.

I see several Condor named companies relate to computers and PCB manufacturing to some extent, eg here and here. Have you done a deep search on the researcher/designer? It could give you some clues. One of the boards is marke as modified 2/09 so there could still be much in the archives available.
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That's basically what I said and think, that the large motherboard and it's accompanying ram/memory cards are professionally manufactured and the two small boards are most definitely etched by hand. And yeah, I did search and saw companies with the name "Condor" but none that seemed like they had anything to do with the early days of microprocessing, the name is fairly generic which always makes searching a bit difficult

Unfortunately, while I did try my best to get as much info about the owner/inventor as I could from the person that I purchased the boards from he couldn't tell me much about the guy, just that he did work for the DNR and Army that I think had to do with tracking and that hold some patents for some of his designs but he didn't even have the name of the guy. Apparently he bought the collection from the guy's son and I guess his son just rambled off some stuff about his father and that was it. Guess the buyer wasn't that interested in the background of the guy so he didn't hound the guy for hia life story like I would have, lol. It's a shame that these guys who purchase estate collections don't care about the history of the stuff and the owners, the people that buy the stiff from them do often and would probably even be willing pay more for the stuff if it's history came along with it.
 
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