Old hardware porn

[rbranco]

This beauty is a Sun Ultra 5. It's in a friend's garage in Venezuela.

It looks a little worn out on the outside but it's absolutely gorgeous inside!

 

[DerTeufel]

Is it known which type the Siemens chip is?

 

[rbranco]

Is it known which type the Siemens chip is?

Nope. =/

 

[Crivens]

Is it known which type the Siemens chip is?

Maybe here is an answer?

 

[cracauer@]

Love me some old SPARCs.

 

[blackbird9]

I stumbled across this interesting site today. He has taken photos of many famous classic chips under the microscope, and provides some details of their structure. The Ferranti ZX81 ULA, Burr-Brown DAC80, 555, Intersil 7106, op-amps, TTL logic ... it's a long list, a lot of classic chips. Interesting stuff. In german, but you can use your browser's translate factility to read his descriptions in english, he gives circuit diagrams in some cases and explains the main features of the chips' designs. Very interesting to see mugshots of what we've been using all these years! Definitely old hardware pron.

Richi´s Lab

Richi´s-Lab bietet teilweise umfangreiche Dokumentationen vieler verschiedener elektronischer Bauteile inklusive hochauflösender Bilder.

www.richis-lab.de

This is the ZX81 Ferranti ULA https://github.com/abaffa/zx81/blob/main/schema/ZX81_Andy_Rea_ULA_Explained.pdf

This is a Fairchild uA555 https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/2171542/FAIRCHILD/UA555.html

A NatSemi LM741

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm741.pdf?ts=1740664938871

We used to make mixing desks out of these before the 5532 came along, it seems unbelievable now.

SN7400 from TI https://www.ti.com/product/SN7400

National LM380. I made a nice little battery powered headphone amp out of these chips once, one chip per channel, a super-simple circuit, it was actually surprisingly good. I guess it's pretty obvious which part of the die is the output stage transistors!

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm380.pdf

 

[blackbird9]

Is it known which type the Siemens chip is?

Given it's location next to the expansion bus riser, it could be a bus controller, DMAC, or similar. Maybe a custom ASIC made for sun by siemens, or perhaps even an off the shelf part. Perhaps a PCI controller? The slot I can see looks like PCI...

If you can get the number off the back of the chip you might be able to find a match in this parts list.

Ultra 5 Workstation - Full Components List

 

[Crivens]

Maybe here is an answer?

That chip is pretty close to all the slow IO interfaces like PS/2 and such. Maybe that is the IO controller? Siemens used to make PCs themselves, it would be expected when the same chip is on their main boards.

 

[Erichans]

Sun Ultra 5

Maybe that is the IO controller?

Could be a Siemens SAB 82532 serial communications controller:
https://projects.osmocom.org/attachments/download/8069/SAB SAF 82532 ESCC2 v3.2 [1996-07].pdf

You may also like the Sun Ultra 5/10 Service Manual:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboard...manual-805-0423-11-63375c31c7fbb243431335.pdf

Before turning on such an old workstation, take care and be cautious of exploding capacitors, especially inside the PSU. I'd consider replacing them beforehand.