Q800 and mystery Nubus cards

[Bunsen]

Well, closer inspection of the Q840AV reveals damage to the rear and side plastics as well

So, one of these boards at least is going to go into some form of alternative case; perhaps a Q700 or PM7100, a custom, or one of my much delayed theoretical casemods. Other thoughts; moving it into an ATX case, G3 iMac, or G3/G4 smurftower; re-using the existing case's bare metal frame, with flat plexi sides, or making up fake, G3/G4 tower style curvy case sides for it; cutting down the 840 plastics to the undamaged portions to make an external FeetsDrive

BTW, a suspiciously chunky cardboard box has arrived }

 

[Bunsen]

Ok, de-boxed, and de-mystified - mostly.

Firstly, now that is how you pack a computer. 1/2" polystyrene foam sheeting, shrinkwrapped around the Quadra, then boxed, then bubblewrapped, then boxed again.

NB - some of the Nubus cards had come loose, so I suggest to anyone reading this that if you're packing an old machine you remove cards from their slots, wrap individually, and stuff them back inside the case somewhere if possible.

Cards:

• Video card: Radius Precision Color 24XP v1.42
  
• ISDN modem: Planet ISDN 2B S0/Mac II; ports - RJ45, RJ11 and miniDIN 9 pin
  
• Serial card: Creative Solutions Hurdler HQS 3.09B; ports - 4 x miniDIN 8 pin

So I'm guessing this was an old dial-up BBS or ISP server. It's a pity the hard drive wasn't present - there could have been some interesting goodies on there.

Other inhabitants include a caddy-loading CD-ROM drive, floppy, PS, what looks like 4x RAM & 2x VRAM sticks, and feral dust bunnies.

 

[kite210]

That's a great find, you could definitely get some use out of that machine.

I say install A/UX on it.

just my $0.02 :beige:

 

[Bunsen]

Well, searching around for information on the Hurdler serial card, turns out it is compatible with A/UX. Given my hunch that this was a server, maybe it was running A/UX in its former life. Not that that helps now, with the HD gone.

I'm also finding conflicting hints as to whether the Hurdler is Appletalk compatible. One site says yes, another says ???, another says no, and so on. It does seem that the ports are based on Apple's RS232/RS422 ports. If they can operate as Appletalk ports, that would be very useful for a LocalTalk Bridge type box to serve a classic LAN.

 

[Bunsen]

Found the old CSI support pages on the wayback machine and downloaded everything I could get in the way of drivers and help files.