On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardso...@gmail.com> wrote: > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier.
Neat! I used to have a friendly scrapper for a friend - got a BA23 from him, and some VAXBI boards (because was quite happy to pay him well over the gold value) - but that was coming up on 20 years ago. > Also several Emulex boards which didn't > contain anything that was obviously a part number (from memory a couple that > were "full width" and three that were "half width") - I'm guessing they're > probably tape controllers, but they might be hard disk. Emulex made a lot of disk and tape and serial comms interfaces. If they are dual-width, they are Qbus for sure. If they are quad-width, they could be Qbus or Unibus, though in my experience, Unibus Emulex cards are hex-width, taking advantage of the board space to load up features/port count. Thinking back to the Emulex CS/21 16-port serial card, it has a pair of 50-pin connectors, but the array of 40-pin DIP UARTs and the cluster of EIA line drivers by the connectors means it's fairly easy to see it's a serial card. I don't know if Emulex ever did Qbus serial cards, so a dual or quad-height card with one or two 50-pin connectors is more likely to be SCSI, disk or tape or both, than serial, so all I'd advise there is looking for tell-tale signs of an actual board name/number or the characteristic parts associated with SCSI vs EIA serial. They also made ESDI and SMD interfaces, but the pin count there is a dead giveaway. -ethan
