An interesting "microprocessor" find?

Well, it could be a home built computer or maybe an interface to something larger. It's an interesting piece of history whatever it is.

Anybody have a clue what this is?

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Its a....mess

I've done wire wrap and that's pretty much how it looks. Considering it's solderless; wire wrap was very reliable.

blueroomelectronics said:

I've done wire wrap and that's pretty much how it looks. Considering it's solderless; wire wrap was very reliable.

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I have done wire wrap too, just used some different color wires..

I used to use a commercially-built spectrum analyzer that was entirely wire-wrap. Hundreds of chips on several large boards.

When it came time to troubleshoot, I rapidly made the determination that repairs were a job for the manufacturer.

Jon Chandler said:

I used to use a commercially-built spectrum analyzer that was entirely wire-wrap. Hundreds of chips on several large boards.

When it came time to troubleshoot, I rapidly made the determination that repairs were a job for the manufacturer.

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Good call!

Its not that old, maybe 20 years or so, I have seen them as part of a show control for animatronics, you know talking robots with stuff going on in the back ground. I work in haunted houses, fix the electronic stuff, that is what got me into mcu's.

I've done wire wrap and that's pretty much how it looks. Considering it's solderless; wire wrap was very reliable.

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Actually, wire wrapping makes a much stronger mechanical connection than soldered components (at least with thru-hole components - things are probably different now with near microscopic SMT parts); typically, back in the day, if a board was going to be subjected to vibration or other mechanical stress, and needed the ability to repair to the component level, you were likely to see it wire-wrapped. There's a certain art to it; proper wire wrapping involved making the connections in a certain order, so that if a repair was later needed for a given pin, as few unwraps as possible were done.

I also must say this guy got a helluva Goodwill find; but this is what I mean when I say Goodwill is a great place to shop for stuff like electronics junk and such - you really never know what you'll find!

We used to build toggle switch microprocessors like that on the late 70's, usually 8080 or SC/MP etc, by the time Z80 and 6802 came out most people were using hex keypads. But they always had a 40 pin micro and at least one other 40 pin IC, a peripheral interface chip. Then usually a wide 28 pin eeprom and/or wide 28pin ram chip. Then we programmed them by flipping the toggle switches to set address and data and pressing the "memorise" button LOL. Again it would have had probably 12 to 14 switches for address and 8 more switches for data.

That device is not that old, the blue rotary switch is recent, 70's ones were brown bakelite. And thumbnail switches are fairly recent, and so are LS chips. I think it was custom made probably in 1985 as per the sticker, and it seems to be a gang programmer or tester of some type, probably made in a hurry for a specific test task. It has 4 sockets, for the target ICs I guess.

The rotary switch has "load, prog, single set" all seem to be something to do with gang programming. I guess the parallel port went to a PC, then this device was used to program the target chips and then do testing. The 4 target IC sockets are wired the same, and are 16pin ICs, so they were not PICs. The 10 pins that are wired on each IC would give a clue to what the target ICs were. That is a bit of a mystery, I don't remember any 16pin microcontrollers around 1985 and when I bought one of the first picstarts in about 1987 the PIC16cXX were 18 pin. Maybe it was one of the early Motorola micros?

Mr RB said:

The rotary switch has "load, prog, single set" all seem to be something to do with gang programming. I guess the parallel port went to a PC, then this device was used to program the target chips and then do testing. The 4 target IC sockets are wired the same, and are 16pin ICs, so they were not PICs. The 10 pins that are wired on each IC would give a clue to what the target ICs were. That is a bit of a mystery, I don't remember any 16pin microcontrollers around 1985 and when I bought one of the first picstarts in about 1987 the PIC16cXX were 18 pin. Maybe it was one of the early Motorola micros?

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There seems to be some confusion about the device?, why would it have to be anything to do with microcontrollers? - the other pictures he posted elsewhere simply show TTL chips.

Nigel Goodwin said:

There seems to be some confusion about the device?, why would it have to be anything to do with microcontrollers? - the other pictures he posted elsewhere simply show TTL chips.

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hi Nigel,
I would agree, it looks like a simple sequencer for a production test department.

The label shows it to be about 1985,, thats quite a modern piece of technology for us 'old guys'..

ericgibbs said:

hi Nigel,
I would agree, it looks like a simple sequencer for a production test department.

The label shows it to be about 1985,, thats quite a modern piece of technology for us 'old guys'..

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The latest date codes on the chips look to be '85 as well, yep, newish stuff.

ericgibbs said:

hi Nigel,
I would agree, it looks like a simple sequencer for a production test department.

The label shows it to be about 1985,, thats quite a modern piece of technology for us 'old guys'..

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You hit it on the head

They even had chip testers where I worked you set a nob or two and pressed some buttons the nice leds would light up

NigelGoodwin-

There seems to be some confusion about the device?, why would it have to be anything to do with microcontrollers? - the other pictures he posted elsewhere simply show TTL chips.

Click to expand...

Because it appears to be a programmer, the main control has "load, prog, single set" etc these are all typical for gang programmers. load = get data from PC, prog = program the target chips, single set = use the toggle switches to program a specific byte, often used for programming dates etc into the target IC. The test thumbwheel would probably be to test the contents of any specific memory location in the target IC and display on the 8 leds and/or program a specific location.

The target ICs have 16 pin, which rules out most of the EPROMs of the day that were wide 24 and wide 28 pin. I was only theorising "what if" the target chips were some type of micro, they may have been a 16pin single burn PROM or something. I remember something about narrow pinout PROMs being available but never used one.

Definitly looks like a sequencer to me, maybe something as simple as an interface for something external that did the actual work. The clock dial indicates that it might have at least generated some signals modified by the settings of the switches.