Unidentified Wire-Wrap Boards
I acquired these three wire-wrapped boards from a warehouse in spring of 2019. I have no idea what they actually are. Each one has a pair of AM2901 bit-slice processors (as well as other parts from the AM2900 series) and plenty of 7400 series logic.
Two of the boards are labeled with a part number or project identifier of “HLP 711 704276-202″ with the difference of one being “Rev A-A-A-A” and the other being “A-A-A-B”. There are only very subtle differences between these two boards. The third is quite a bit different and is labeled “704277-203″. I’m not sure if it is a much later revision, or a different part altogether.
No amount of searching has lead me to a positive identification for these boards. They appear to be prototypes built by Adage, Inc., which made raster and vector graphics workstations. The chips on these boards are mostly dated 1984 and 1985, with the latest I’ve seen being week 15 of 1985. So best guess for when these boards were assembled would be a few weeks after that. It does seem 1985 is a little late to be building processors out of discrete logic, but around that time the first Amiga prototypes had discrete wire-wrapped prototypes of their custom chips. I suppose it’s possible these could be prototypes for what would become custom ASICs.
I have found information on Adage using the AM29116 and AM2903 bit-slice processors as early as 1982. I’ve not found anything about them using the earlier AM2901 found on these boards. The AM2901 is also only 4-bit and these boards only have two of them; so far I’ve not found any mention of an 8-bit product from Adage.
Adage released the CADStation 2/50 in 1985, which was intended to be a low cost workstation. The CADStation 2/50 was revealed at SIGGRAPH in July of 1984, so these boards are too late to be prototypes from that product. The CADStation 2/50 also used the AM29116 (pdf, pg. 12), which again calls attention to the oddity of Adage using the AM2901 when their low-end product used the AM29116.
Adage also released their new 6000 series workstations (pdf) in 1985. The first being the 6080 announced in January, and the stand-alone 6500 announced in September. The 6000 series is listed as using the“Proprietary OCEAN Graphics Engine”. A NASA survey (pdf, pg. 11) of graphics systems in 1987 lists the 6500 as using the AM29116. The Adage 6480 terminal was released in 1986, but it’s just another model in the 6000 series.
The 3140 (pdf, pg. 25) was released in July of 1985 as the latest in the 3000 series, and the 3500 graphics system was released in 1986 along with the 6480. The 3000 series (pdf, pg. 12) was built around the AM2903 and had a 32-bit graphics processor (requiring a total of eight AM2903 chips).
So I have no idea what these boards actually are. They have the Adage name on them, and the bit-slice chips used on them fall in line with other Adage products at the time. But, I cannot find any mention of an Adage product that specifically used the AM2901, or would have used only a pair of them.
