Couple of cool HP 110/150 finds (HP88396/395)

From: Carlos Murillo <cem14_at_cornell.edu>
Date: Thu May 11 22:48:59 2000

At 02:17 PM 5/11/00 -0500, Joe wrote:
>>>Today, I was given a bunch of interesting vintage items.
>>> HP 88396 SCSI to parrallel interface.
>
> Did you ever find out more about this?
> I just picked up one of one yesterday with the cables. The other end of
>the cable that fits the DB-25 connector has a male Centronics style
>connector on it. The SCSI port has a feed-through type terminator on it.
>Attached to that is a cable that has a micro-SCSI connector on the other
>end of it. FWIW the box says "same functionality as 88395".
>
> Joe

I also have an 88395. It has been a puzzle for me. The enclosure
is the same of such HPIL gadgets as the 82164 and 82165. However,
the power supply connector is different; mine in fact had a big
wart xformer attached made by AT&T and rated 20VAC, 2A, and marked
"security isolation transformer".

Inside, there is an MC68B09FN uController, an NCR SCSI chip,
an MB8464-15 static ram, a 28 pin ROM, bridge+filter+regulator,
and finally, what seems like too much glue logic (14 chips) near
the parallel port. In particular, there is a 20 pin quad (TI 901FF)
somewhere between the data bus and the paralell port. Perhaps
some clocked parallel I/O? or a FIFO? Seems to me that they were
trying to increase the speed of the parallel port to meet that of the
SCSI chip at the other end. The chips were all manufactured in '88 or
before, so I'd say this was built in '89 . This was a device
designed to provide SCSI connectivity to something that had parallel
ports and no easy way of adding other cards; I don't think that it
was intended for Vectras. I suspect that this was designed to
give the HPIB-based 9000-300 systems (which had a parallel port) the
opportunity to talk to SCSI tape drives, perhaps even HD's (though
not for boot devices, I'm sure). 1989 is about the right time;
it was then that it became clear that HPIB hard disks were a dead end.

carlos
Received on Thu May 11 2000 - 22:48:59 BST