Subject: Scientific Micro Systems boards?

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Mar 21 13:58:00 2003

Hi,

   I keep finding a lot of boards made by SMS and I'm wondering if they're worth picking up. A lot of them seem to be out of DEC systems and/or 8" floppy drive controllers that are used with DEC stuff. I usually leave them behind but I picked up one yesterday for parts. this one is a Q-bus card and has an AM2901ADC bit slice CPU, an Intel 8085, an intel 8155 and an Intel 8253. It says that it's model # FWD 0106, Assy # 000420-0001, Fab # 0004222 Rev C.

   Any thoughts on this?

   Joe

---

From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Mar 21 14:36:00 2003

--- Joe <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    I keep finding a lot of boards made by SMS and I'm wondering if
> they're worth picking up. A lot of them seem to be out of DEC systems
> and/or 8" floppy drive controllers that are used with DEC stuff. 

How expensive?  $5?  $50?

> I usually leave them behind but I picked up one yesterday for parts. this
> one is a Q-bus card and has an AM2901ADC bit slice CPU, an Intel 8085, an
> intel 8155 and an Intel 8253. It says that it's model # FWD 0106, Assy #
> 000420-0001, Fab # 0004222 Rev C.

I'm not so familiar with SMS products... what connectors are on the
edge of the board?

-ethan

---

From: "David C. Jenner" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Mar 21 18:40:01 2003

Joe,

The SMS FWD0106 is a disk controller for both floppies and hard drives.
It actually consists of two cards: an interface that connects to the
QBus or the Unibus (there are two versions) and a formatter card that
connects to the interface card.  (The formatter card can plug into the
QBus or Unibus to get power, or it can be fed power by a connector;
the formatter card does not use any QBus or Unibus signals.)

The formatter handles both 5.25 and 8 inch floppies (one type at a time)
and various types of MFM harddrives.  There are several types of harddrives
that you can use, depending on the ROM version on the formatter.  The
floppies can be RX01 or RX02 compatible, or can be a double-sided version
of the RX02.  The harddrive interface does not correspond to any DEC
drive type.  You need a special SMS driver for this card for RT-11, or
there is an OEM version of 2.9BSD that supports this card.

I have a number of these, and managed to get in 1989 a set of the last
version of the ROMs from SMS just before they went out of business. These
ROMs support about a couple of dozen MFM disk types, most of them pretty
old.

If you have some EPROMs left from parts, it would be interesting to hear
what versions you have.  The numbers on the EPROMs will be something like
1002013-0019 and 1002013-0020 at U65 and U64.

Dave

-- 
David C. Jenner
[email-masked]

---

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Mar 21 20:02:15 2003

>> and/or 8" floppy drive controllers that are used with DEC stuff. 

   Usually a couple of bucks. It depends on where I buy them. I find them at a number of different places. I probably find one per week on the average.

>I'm not so familiar with SMS products... what connectors are on the

   This particular one looks like it fits a Q-bus slot and even has the to metal extractor handles like those used on some of the DEC stuff but I've seen them in all kinds of shapes and sizes including one that looked like the smaller DEC cards that have two edge connectors (can't think of the name right now.) I can't even lay my hands on this one at the moment so I'll have to wait till I find it to tell you what other connectors it has.

   Joe

---

From: Don Maslin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Mar 22 00:12:01 2003

>    This particular one looks like it fits a Q-bus slot and even has the to metal extractor handles like those used on some of the DEC stuff but I've seen them in all kinds of shapes and sizes inclu…

If I am not confusing different companies, Scientific Micro
Systems was bought out and 'repackaged' as SMS Technologies, a San
Jose company.  In one or both forms they also manufactured the
OMTI line of SCSI, ESDI, and ST412 HD controllers.

						- don

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From: "Robert Krten" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Mar 22 07:21:33 2003

Joe sez...
>    I keep finding a lot of boards made by SMS and I'm wondering if they're worth picking up. A lot of them seem to be out of DEC systems and/or 8" floppy drive controllers that are used with DEC st…

Prolly at least worthwhile for the 8085 and other spare parts...
I'm looking for 6802's (and 6821's) and having a hard time...

How much are they costing you?

Cheers,
-RK

--
Looking for Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1 through PDP-15 minicomputers!
Robert Krten, PARSE Software Devices +1 613 599 8316.
Realtime Systems Architecture, Consulting and Training at www.parse.com

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From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Mar 22 07:53:01 2003

>How much are they costing you?

   It varies but usually a couple of bucks. Generally I "shop" at the scrap places so if I don't buy them they end up being scrapped for the metal but there's little if any gold in the SMS stuff so it's cheap.

>I'm looking for 6802's (and 6821's) and having a hard time...

  I find them occasionally, I'll start picking up some. Do you mind unsoldering them or are you just looking for socketed parts? I think most of the 68xx stuff that I've seen is soldered in. I generally don't bother with soldered in parts but you may not have any choice. Drop me a line in a month or so I'll let you know what I find.

    Joe

---

From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Mar 23 16:18:00 2003

> I'm looking for 6802's (and 6821's) and having a hard time...

6821s are available for a couple of bucks from BG Micro.

-ethan