Monthly Archives: January 2014

Have You Ever Used One of These?

Still on the theme of unusual hardware… in my junk pile there’s one of these rather special little parts: As the label on the PCB says, this is a 486 pod for a Periscope IV debugger. The Periscope Company of … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, PC hardware | 35 Comments

Early PCI Board

Since some of this blog’s readers are very good at recognizing obscure hardware, I thought I’d post photos of one more somewhat exotic graphics card: This board was one of the early PCI graphics adapters. It’s old enough that it … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 27 Comments

Two More TIGAs

Since some readers appear to enjoy identifying prehistoric graphics cards, I thought I’d post photos of two more TIGA boards from my junk pile. I know what these are, but do you? One of them ought to be fairly easy … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 14 Comments

Another Vermont Microsystems Board

My junk pile turned out to contain another board by Vermont Microsystems, Inc. (VMI), probably no less exotic than the mystery board. This one is a Microchannel board built around an Intel 82786. An in this case, VMI was kind … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 19 Comments

Have You Seen These Cards?

While cataloging my junk pile, I came across two graphics cards that I could not identify. Both are high-end ISA graphics accelerators from the early 1990s and both utilize Texas Instruments GPUs (long before the term “GPU” was first used, … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware | 38 Comments

Apologies for the outage

The site has been unavailable for a while because some creative person or persons decided to use it for sending out spam and setting up a beautifully crafted facsimile of PayPal. It appears that a vulnerability in an old WordPress … Continue reading

Posted in Site Management | 5 Comments