SE/30 - What card could this be?

[Daniël]

So I saw an SE/30 for sale locally, and something got me quite, quite curious. It appears to have some sort of PDS card, but it has a single DSUB connector, seemingly the E size of DSUB. The picture is pretty poor, so I can't tell how many pins this connector has. Also, it seems like there's a PCB right behind it. Anyone ever seen anything like it?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

DE-9 is could be a grayscale or B&W FPD or TPD video card. Color would be a DA-15 connector. Did they have HD-15 in that era? I've never see that on any card before the Mac finally adopted VGA.

 

[Dog Cow]

DE-9 is could be a grayscale or B&W FPD or TPD video card.

Agreed. Could likely be a display card.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

"is could be!" : At least it's not a typo this time. I started to say "is commonly user for." The colloquial "might could be" would be phrasing I'd employ for real, but not that. :lol:

It's a crapshoot, if FPD it would be a lot more difficult to make use of any which way. If analog TPD, things would be more likely to work. If it's for a dedicated TTL TPD that's another story entirely. It's kinda like a recessive gene carried in a good way. You've got a 25% chance of winding up with what might turn out to be a nice bonus.

That would be IF it's a vidcard. Otherwise it's impossible to come up with any kind of odds on the prospect of using it the way I see it.

The other wild card would be that the slot is empty, with only the breakout board remaining.

 

[Daniël]

Well, I have picked up this Macintosh SE/30 today. Seller said it wasn't working, he turned it on and it was just Death Chime looping. I picked it up for €55, to accompany my other SE/30. At home, I pulled it apart, finding out that it is in fact not a video card of any kind, but a "h-three Systems Corporation" card with a whole bunch of TI chips. Looking at datasheets of said TI chips, this appears to be a Token Ring NIC. I wonder if this can be adapted to a modern Ethernet network.

As for the SE/30 itself, I pulled four 2-chip Texas Instruments RAM SIMMs of unknown capacity out, leaving four 1MB SIMMs with Motorola chips in, it will chime now, but no video. I noticed some corrosion on the edge connector (or whatever it is, it looks like that) under the ROM SIMM, although it hasn't spread, so it should be easy to clean off. A few traces have brown crud on them, a few near the tiny audio capacitor, and a few near C13. C13 also cleanly fell off while handling the boards, leaving the pads intact thankfully. I'm going to assume these capacitors are just truly toast. Maybe UE8 is bad on this one as well, but I've managed to fix that on my other SE/30, so not too worried about that. At least the battery didn't leak at all! Time to order some caps I think

 

[SE30_Neal]

Unusual connector for sure!

 

[Paralel]

That "DO NOT TOUCH THIS MODULE" is sooo tempting.

It reminds me of a system I got from someone when I was 16 and it had an original Seagate ST-506 in it and it had this warning on it:

So, of course, I couldn't help myself and I touched it when it was moving, and killed the sucker. I could never get the drive working again after that.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Isn't Token Ring done on a ThinNet Cable type setup? The DE-9 must have been for a transceiver? Have you installed the card in your good /30 to read info off the DeclROM with Tattletech to get the lowdown on the card yet? Pics of the connector, the breakout board and the cable connecting it to the card would be much appreciated.

 

[Franklinstein]

Token Ring is media agnostic, so long as everything in the Ring shares the same media or has appropriate hub equipment to bridge the different media. The DSub connector was probably for an AUI to whatever media you were using. Normally Ethernet cards that have AUIs use DB15 (like a Mac video connector or PC game port).

Token Ring is largely useless today due to the use of special hardware and different protocols than Ethernet; you can't use a Token Ring card on an Ethernet network (unless someone built special multi-function cards or something). Plus there's the fact that it hasn't been in development for at least 20 years and no modern network equipment is likely to be Token Ring-aware.

 

[Daniël]

I'll look at putting it into my working SE/30 and using Tattletech on it, and making some high res pictures, once I have the time and energy to do that. 

As for the Ethernet idea, certain devices to bridge Token Ring with Ethernet did exist, but finding them would probably be nigh-impossible. I've been told a lot about Token Ring since I got it, and yeah, generally the consensus is that this PDS card is not much more than a novelty. Finding equipment to set up a whole Token Ring network is difficult and probably not worth the money either. I didn't buy the SE/30 on the grounds of it having some rare special card, and went in with the idea of it not being anything special, so I'm not too disappointed. At the end, it's just a cool restoration project to give my working SE/30 a sibling