Vintage 1984 Convergent MiniFrame motherboard, 512KB RAM, 10 MHz Motorola 68010
Below are the seller's words, directly from his auctions. Too bad, I private messaged him, to tell him I would have gladly bought a fully assembled MiniFrame and gone to his location for local pickup. Another one of these rare machines (partially) bites the dust...but we'll save and resurrect what remains!
Motherboard
from a Convergent MiniFrame Unix PC from 1984, 512KB RAM, Western
Digital MFM controller, dual serial ports, 10 MHz Motorola 68010 CPU.
Here
is the motherboard from a 1984 Convergent MiniFrame, which was a Unix
tower designed by an important company which in 1988 became the network
systems division of Unisys. Convergent Technology helped develop the
smaller but similar AT&T PC-7300.
The
person who found a Convergent MiniFrame for me in late 2017 didn't
think anyone would pay shipping for a the large heavy case and power
supply, so he removed the motherboard, memory cards, cluster board and
69MB Micropolis MFM hard drive only, discarding the rest. I have no way
to tell if this is working or not, but it is an interesting and
hard-to-find piece of hardware from 35 years ago. It is easier to find
online documentation about the Convergent MiniFrame than it is to find
parts of one. I am happy to answer questions to the best of my
ability.
The
processor is a socketed 10 MHz Motorola 68010. There are also sockets
for the Western Digital hard drive controller chips, Intel D8724 serial
controller, AMD P8253 programmable interval timer and 41 more socketed
chips. The onboard RAM consists of 72 soldered-down NEC 64 kilobit DRAM
chips (512KB total). The 100-pin header and large metal rectangular
support are for memory expansion and I/O cluster boards (which I will
list separately on eBay). One edge of the motherboard has two 20-pin
headers and one 34-pin connector for cabling for two hard drives. There
is also a 34-pin connector for a floppy drive cable. The back side of
the motherboard has two female DB 25 ports labeled "Channel 0" and
"Channel 1" (serial ports for terminals?) and a parallel printer port
plus a DB9 female connector labeled "Cluster" which is for attaching one
of Convergent's RS422 terminals.
2 Vintage Convergent Technologies Miniframe 512KB RAM cards + Ethernet board
2 512KB RAM expansion boards and an RS422 Cluster board from a 1984 Convergent MiniFrame Unix PC from 1984
