Strange Qbus cards: Data Systems Design and Marconi

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Fri Oct 3 19:44:20 2003

Fred,

   I can't tell you much about them but I recently picked up about 350 8"
floppy disks that came from Marconi. They were used on PDP-11s that was
part of circuit board test stations. That's where the disks that I sent to
Al came from. He's reading them and is supposed to archive the usefull
software. The computers were stripped before I got there but I found some
of the circuit cards in the board scrap. A few were DEC but most were
custom made. I didn't take any of the custom ones and I don't remember if
they were made by Marconi or not. They were DSD hard drives on the systems.
One of the things that Al (and others) wanted were the drivers for the DSD
drives. I found four or five of the drives but no interface cards. That was
the DSD drives that I was asking about here on the list several weeks ago.
FWIW some of the disks had a Marconi address somewhere in California. In
fact, I think it might have been Sunnyvale. I suspect that you got part of
the same systems.

   Joe

At 12:50 AM 10/4/03 +0200, you wrote:
>Hiyas,
>
>One of the results of today's 400mi drive is a box of Qbus cards that
>once were in custom PDP-11 based systems in use at various locations
>at Marconi. Most are the usual suspects found in such systems, but
>there's also a bunch of weird ones:
>
>- two Data Systems Design cards.. half-height, some RAM, some PROMs
> and a fair bit of logic. One 16Mhz xtal. One connector (28 pins
> or so)
>
>- a bunch of what look to be custom-made boards, with the Marconi
> label and typing. M-12 and such.
>
>Does anyone know more about these?
>
>Cheers,
> Fred
>--
>Fred N. van Kempen, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Collector/Archivist
>Visit the VAXlab Project at http://www.pdp11.nl/VAXlab/
>Visit the Archives at http://www.pdp11.nl/
>Email: waltje_at_pdp11.nl BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS / Sunnyvale, CA, USA
>
>
Received on Fri Oct 03 2003 - 19:44:20 BST

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