Mystery LSI-11 board

[Ethan Dicks]

On 8/24/05, Paul Koning <pkoning at equallogic.com> wrote:
> One possibility is that it's a third party board with handles
> manufactured by DEC attached to them.  DEC sold those handles
> separately, and you could just attach them to your own board...

That was quite common with 3rd party boards.  We used real DEC
stiffener/latches for our Unibus and Qbus products, but we never
stamped a number on them anywhere.  You had to see the pattern of
lights to locate our board in the backplane (easy because we had 3
clusters of 4-LED DialLite assemblies).  Out of the backplane, though,
we clearly marked our boards with model number and our address/phone
number (1-800-SRC-DATA)
 
> Yet another thing to look for: DEC boards have a DEC logo ("digital"
> in 7 blocks -- unless it's quite old) somewhere on the board, almost
> certainly near the edge.

That depends on your definition of "quite old".  I don't recall ever
seeing a Digital logo on the boards that were hand-taped.  Once DEC
moved to machine-routed boards with solder mask, _that_ era all had a
logo in copper.  So... some time in the late 1970s to early 1980s
would be where I remember seeing logos (Rainbows, Professional 3xx...
that era).  Older Qbus stuff may or may not have a logo (but I _think_
all the Qbus stuff was designed with CAD).

-ethan

P.S. - it _does_ look like Qbus to me - I think I see grant jumpers on
the right side fingers on the view of the solder side.

P.P.S. - just because there are lots of ECOs doesn't mean that the
board wasn't a production board... we shipped our first "COMBOARD-II"s
to customers with 14 component adds (mostly resistors), about 30 cuts
and about 50 jumps.  OTOH, that doesn't look like DEC ECO practice
(nor does it have a DEC feel to me).  I wouldn't start by looking for
any DEC identifiers - that's pretty clearly a 3rd party board.