Added: 7 months ago
From: mikeselectricstuff
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  • Hmmm, I'm not sure those I/O boards are space rated. Too little shielding on the various chips, compared to the CPU and memory boards. Unless those were atypically installed and shielded by the other boards and structure of the body of the chassis, which is doubtful.

    Still, nice mil spec work IS a thing of beauty.

    For those talking about "industrial electrolytics", you're thanking tantalum capacitors, not only industrial. :)

  • These were designed for extreme environmental conditions as well as vibration. NSN traces to ADCIS computer assembly. USAF equipment unlikely due to presence of hermetic coating on boards. Lack of this caused the B2 to crash on Guam. A decent production quantity, NSN assigned in 1991.

  • I worked at an US eastern seaboard aerospace manufacturer in the 90's and 00's which had qualified sole-source MIL and NASA (F14,F15 programs, much retrofit work out of WR AFB, and a life support sub-assem for Ham-Std on the Shuttle's EVA suits !). These samples are beautiful! Having done advanced bench tech work there, I fully appreciate the engineering behind them. I agree with a previous poster - have them nicely mounted in a glass case and display them as artwork !

  • Did I see that there were no electrolytic capacitors? This makes sense because others have told they are not very reliable everywhere.

  • @Riskteven I would not be suprised at all if they would have been totally banned in more or less critical systems if not in all systems. Ceramic capacitors are very reliable but expensive as hell at higher capacity but the militatry and NASA dont give a shit about that since only best is good enough.

  • @dtiydr And then connect them in parallel to get more out of them.

  • @Riskteven Based on that this in not capacitors for the normal market it would most likely be more expensive to get to the right capacitance by buying several smaller ones then to buy one with the right capacitance right away and several also takes more room.

  • @dtiydr Ah Ofcourse! There are also "industrial eolectolytic capacitors" maybe they were used in meters like Fluke or such. I asked about meters and that technican said they didn't use, for meters like Fluke, Hameg, etc. those normal consumer appliance grade capacitors you could find in washing machins, TVs etc.

  • I am very familiar with similar boards manufactured by Smiths Industries Aerospace (GE Aerospace) Grand Rapids Division. The same manufacturing process can be seen since the late 70's well into the 2000's. Commercial and Military Aircraft Flight Management Systems use very similar construction with Birtcher Wedge-lock card retainers and I mean solid reliability!

  • Try military drawing numbers for decoding what are the ICs. But this peace sure looks like RADAR comp, but radars that I have seen didn't have boards packed double. Radar boards are robust, but this is excessive!

    Sure looks like some PDP-ish comp.

  • Has the whole board been coated with some kind of clear protective layer?

  • @shaurz Yes, it is covered with conformal coating.

  • @andreasm thanks

  • Damn, those are just...freakin' beautiful! Almost creepy how uniform everything appears, like someone with a sort of super-OCD did the PCB layout. I can't even imagine how much those boards cost initially, considering the trimmed resistors, the amounts of metal and ceramic, etc.

  • How EMP resistant is it?

  • look like an RDP system, (radar data processing)

  • very shiny, do you think they have like a anti static coating over the board and chips?

  • These are wonderfull museum grade pieces, and samples of the highest possible quality in electronics... great find ! Make sure to check my flikcr photostream, it has a thousand of electronics photos, I am specialized in collecting weirdish electronics Just google for "flickr marshpriborintorg" to locate it.

  • I'm an ex Royal Navy Weapon Engineering Mechanic (Radio) but the only thing I know about those is that they are deffo military and made in the USA. The two digit number in the NSN (Nato Stock Number) is 01 which is the code for the USA, 99 is the code for the UK. Those boards when new would have been frighteningly expensive too, deffo thousands of pounds possibly even tens of thousands. Little lamps used to illuminate buttons when pressed were about £40 each in the 1980's :O

  • This kind of chip packaging was quite common in the Soviet Union.

  • this is a jet computer

  • Way back then, I designed VMEbus cards for a small company that sold to Raytheon and other defense contractors.We didn't make anything this exotic, but those boards could be a repackaged VMEbus design. It's likely that the folks who designed them were sworn to secrecy. We eventually did get into conduction cooled VME designs.

  • A Raytheon VAX 860 (the militarized version of a DEC VAX 6000) was tested in space in May 1991 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-39. Maybe these boards were in orbit! (Discovery's next launch, STS-48, delivered the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite or UARS into orbit which will fall back to earth later today!)

  • DEC internal article:

    Sun. Apr. 29, 1991 at Discovery Mission Time 0 days, 04:11:55 the 1st VAX in space booted VMS. Controllers at Goddard Center report all sensors are nominal and the verification phase is proceeding normally.

    Militarized VAX 6210 by Raytheon. R/W optical disk boot device by Sundstrand.

    Controllers also report, based on the orbital velocity of 17,438 mph, that VMS is now the fastest commercially-available operating system.

    via rec.humor.funny, ID: [S2e4.408@looking.on.ca]

  • @mwarrenus OMG the first, second and the forth was in orbit!!! look at the serial numbers and google!

  • Wow, beautiful boards, must have cost a FORTUNE! - what did you pay for them ? ;-)

  • I've seen at work similar constriction for test automation when I worked designing airbag control units for cars.

    This are quite old mus have a lot of gold. Some chips look like from the time of Cyrix 686 and some much older.

  • Beautiful boards, astonishing construction this is the kind of things I would hang in a wall and call it ART :-)

  • Most chips will be special military chips these are made to be more protected from electromagnetic pulse and radiation, etc...

    Nice to see, thanks :)

  • ADCIS = Air Defence Command Information System? That would seem to be a bigger task than what could be handled by a few boards.

    Were there any manufacturer's names, logos or part numbers on the board?

  • these are boards from a computer that controls a JSTARS radar system. theres a patent floating around for it, and cause youtube doesnt allow url's in comments i will give the patent #

    patent # 5117360

  • @tech4pros1 The NATO item reference, labels it as part of ADCIS, which is a british system.

  • Google for "raytheon adcis". You should find a news item describing it.

  • @andreasm It appears to be a Raytheon model 860 VAX computer system, for military use.

  • This is an extensive mechanical repackaging of DECs VAX computer by Raytheon. Thanks all for the complements. I was very proud of this design. And no, I don't have OCD, and whoever said this was common in the USSR, you are quite inaccurate. The die feature sizes were not.available in the Soviet Union till around ten years later.  @andreasm

  • Comment removed

  • Searching wbparts dot com appears to match the description. ACDIS though means nothing to me or Google, really.

  • Have you tried plugging it in?

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