The interesting thing I've noticed about it, is the chip on the bottom right. It appears to be a dual width DIP chip. It's the coolest and most insane thing I've ever seen.
Gotta give a LOT of love for the gold topped 68ks and the Pentium Pro. Purple and gold is so much more fun to look at than just some black resin.
This isn't mine, though that would be cool. This is a KA820 CPU module board for a VAX 8200 or 8300. The interesting thing I've noticed about it, is the chip on the bottom right. It appears to be a dual width DIP chip. It's the coolest and most insane thing I've ever seen.
The PICs I don't think are all that remarkable actually, but just to tease Alex; mine's bigger.
The COP8 is a pretty basic, ordinary, but pretty obscure, microcontroller. Amazingly enough, it's still supported to this day! Example: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/texas-instruments/COP8SGE728M8-NOPB/COP8SGE728M8-NOPB-ND/366487 Not cheap by any means, but I'm guessing it's used in a lot of military stuff or something, hence the need to keep it alive?
Oooh and I have one of these (well, a 12C508)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C72Zb6rVQAErcxi.jpg
For the digital fans, here's some early Altera parts.
At some intermediate step in the evolution of microcontrollers, we didn't have the technology to make non-volatile memory and the processor logic on the same chip. So kludgy things like this were used to combine the firmware storage on an EPROM which plugged into the CPU package.
Still got this little gem in its original alufoiled inside covered box, 24kB SRAM for the Tandy Model 200.
They only had 8kB chips in those days so they put three of them on a ceramic carrier and added a H138 address decoder
those ceramic hybrid sram things seem to have been very popular, did the sram makers stop making them in pdip or something?
At some intermediate step in the evolution of microcontrollers, we didn't have the technology to make non-volatile memory and the processor logic on the same chip. So kludgy things like this were used to combine the firmware storage on an EPROM which plugged into the CPU package.AFAIK these were also the first of a kind versions for a new microcontroller to be able to easily "reprogram" during debugging instead of erasing the processor you had a bunch op eproms which were much cheaper to have around.
I could repair a Philips laservision player from the begin of the 70s just because they had these piggyback chips
Still got this little gem in its original alufoiled inside covered box, 24kB SRAM for the Tandy Model 200.
They only had 8kB chips in those days so they put three of them on a ceramic carrier and added a H138 address decoder
those ceramic hybrid sram things seem to have been very popular, did the sram makers stop making them in pdip or something?I am not exactly sure that I understand your question.
In any case the Tandy Model200 and 100 were the portable small computers of that day, lcd display, running on AA batteries for what I remember 12 hours or something like that, size did matter. So 8kB pdip srams would occupy too much space.