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These are all SWP (South-Western Products, not to be confused with SWTPC) RAMDISK / 8088 MS-DOS adapter boards. Designed for various CP/M machines of the day, these commonly found their way into Kaypro machines, with Zorba machines being a distant second of sorts.

These are designed to sit on top of the drive stack, plug into the CPU port (the Z80 was pulled and placed on an adapter board) and some special software twiddling gave you a 256k - 1MB RAMDISK (depending on the model) or a MS-DOS mostly-compatible machine that used the host as a terminal.

These were purchased in 2013 and had some of the "missing link" software with them which has now been entered into various archives. The boards themselves are of unknown status, but are being kept around as spares for my working unit. The boards themselves date to the 1984/5 time period.

These are all SWP (South-Western Products, not to be confused with SWTPC) RAMDISK / 8088 MS-DOS adapter boards. Designed for various CP/M machines of the day, these commonly found their way into Kaypro machines, with Zorba machines being a distant second of sorts. These are designed to sit on top of the drive stack, plug into the CPU port (the Z80 was pulled and placed on an adapter board) and some special software twiddling gave you a 256k - 1MB RAMDISK (depending on the model) or a MS-DOS mostly-compatible machine that used the host as a terminal. These were purchased in 2013 and had some of the "missing link" software with them which has now been entered into various archives. The boards themselves are of unknown status, but are being kept around as spares for my working unit. The boards themselves date to the 1984/5 time period.

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[–] • 1 pt

They were common on 70s and 80s stuff, with 90s stuff being SOIC versions. You've probably seen them on newer boards, just didn't recognize it because they look like any other device now.

Bourns and Dale used harvest gold cases Bourns used blue cases Beckman used white ceramic and black plastic GenericCo used any color, I've seen red, blue, black, white, etc.

Not an exhaustive guide, but you can usually assume the manufacturer from the color. Not always, but usually.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

Dale used harvest gold cases

These ones I used in a level translator circuit x20 with BS170's to interface 28v discrete signals down to 3.3v to interface with my FPGA traffic cop. Probably saved me hours of soldering single resistors. That x20 circuits were a pain in the ass...

Wouldn't do that now, it's so easy to get a one-off PCB these days it doesn't make sense to build prototypes like in the days before.

[–] • 1 pt

Yeah, PCBWay has completely re-written the laws about prototypes.

Even for stupid shit like dumb power distribution boards - draw it up and you have it in hand next week.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt (edited )

And you don't even have to torrent a cracked version Proteus/Ares anymore... Altium Circuitmaker is free and the latest free version is pretty close to regular Altium now.

Still use my old Proteus for simulations though... still don't have anything that beats it in that respect.

Edit: Have to say I'm using the Proteus simulations less and less these days, because it's library of MCU's is pretty old now. And then the MCU models it does have, have quirks.