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

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Fri May 12 00:29:24 2000

On Thu, 11 May 2000, Carlos Murillo wrote:

> 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".

Carlos, if the wart is at the end of the mains cable, and the
application unit cable ends up in a 4-pin thing that looks like the head
of an old putter, it is a twin to one that I have that runs an HP
Deskjet printer. The output is 20VAC center-tapped.

                                                 - don
 
> 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 Fri May 12 2000 - 00:29:24 BST