On 5/17/13 5:07 AM, Grant Hodgson wrote:
A client company has sourced a quantity of 'New in Box' iSBC series
memory modules manufactured by Intel in the 1980s for a MULTIBUS based
computer system. These are still in their original, sealed packaging and
have been stored (for 25 years) in controlled conditions. These cards
are required as part of a refresh programme for a mission-critical
application (electricity generation), which are currently using original
Intel cards from the same era.
Oh you lucky devil. Do you have a big beast (MDS80) and an ICE pod as well?
OK.. the actual crystal may have aged or it may not. The electronics
might be ok or might not. Tin whiskers are always an issue, but at
least with that vintage, all the solder has plenty of lead in it.
I would think that other things than the oscillator would be the
problem. It's not like ICs just go bad sitting there unpowered: failures
are due to packaging issues. Hermetic seals that aren't hermetic and
stuff like that. Socketed parts are always an issue.
I'll bet a lot of people on this list are running equipment with boards
that are 30 years old in them.
Voyager has lots of 40 year old parts and is still working at the edge
of the solar system (granted, those parts were specially selected..)
I'd just do the things you outlined, power it up, and see if the
oscillator module is putting out the 64.1 kHz...
Good luck on the DRAM, though.. I spent a LOT of time tracking down
seeming double bit errors on DRAM multibus memory cards in the 80s, only
to find that it was timing issues. Back then, the part timing varied a
lot from part to part, and PWB design technique was nowhere near as
sophisticated as it is today in terms of terminations and so forth.
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