New aquisition: Texas Instruments TI 980A

From: James B. DiGriz <jbdigriz_at_dragonsweb.org>
Date: Thu Mar 7 14:40:18 2002

Ethan Dicks wrote:
> Just got a strange little toy from a friend who dug it out of a warehouse
> today... a TI 980A. I found a little bit on Al Kossow's Orphan page; does
> anyone know of any other sources for info on the 'net?
>
> It appears to be a 16-bit mini from 1972, 4Kwords to 32Kwords (mine
> has 8KW) with a variety of period peripherals available. Mine has an
> I/O card, a TTY card and a homemade card that extends the DMA slot
> and takes the signals over to a rack-mounted tray that is about 2.5 sq ft.
> of wire wrap sockets and chips dating from 1970 to 1993 (it was apparently
> in service somewhat recently I'm told). The CPU is on two cards plus a
> memory controller.
>
> That's about all I have on it at the moment. Oh! It does have toggle
> switches and blinkenlights. Here's what I could glean by reading
> numbers off of cards...
>
> "Arithmetic Unit 1" - assy 960754-0001E Board No 960755-001C
> "Arithmetic Unit 2" - assy 960751-0001G Board No 960752-001C
> "1103 Memory" - assy 226844-004N/RS Logic 226846-F (8K)
> "Memory Controller" - assy 960746-0001E Logic 960777-A
> "TTY interface" - assy 217394-0001H Logic 217359-F
> "I/O interface" - assy 960757-0001A Logic 960759
>
>
> Anybody else out there have one? My friend is going to keep digging in
> the warehouse this month; he suspects he knows where some docs are, but
> he's not sure.
>
> -ethan
>

A list member has auctioned a couple of 980B's on Ebay. They came from
Jeol NMR spectrometers where they were used to do Fourier transforms.
(I'd think they'd be running the instruments too, but they wouldn't have
to. I hope, too, that these were from upgrades and the spectrometers
didn't just get junked.)

I think Kossow got one of them. Check with him.

Best I've been able to find out, from a former TI field service tech,
the 980 uses a version of the TILINE bus, whereas the 960's used
strictly CRU (serial) and the 990 has both. I don't know a lot about it
other than that. The CPU is not the same as 990. I believe the ALU is
capable of some vector operations, but I could be wrong about that. I'd
  expect there's a lot of similarity, though. Wish I knew more.

jbdigriz
Received on Thu Mar 07 2002 - 14:40:18 GMT