Board Bucket

Small bus-oriented microprocessor development systems used internally at Tektronix for all kinds of various projects. Initial processor board utilized the Motorola 6800, and was used during the development of the Tektronix 4051. Later processor boards supported the Intel 8085 and Motorola 6809. Early CPU boards contained CPU and bus interface logic only. Later boards (a follow-on 6800-based board was the first) included a couple of 8-bit parallel ports, a couple of RS-232 serial ports, sockets for a little bit (1 or 2K bytes) of RAM, and a socket or two for PROM. Numerous other boards were made, including static RAM (up to 32K bytes), a 300-baud modem board (based on a Motorola modem chip), dynamic RAM (up to 64K bytes), a multi-port parallel I/O board, an 8-port RS-232 serial board, a bitmapped video/real-time clock board, a 5 1/4" floppy disc controller, and a primitive I/O-driven SCSI interface. There are probably other boards, as lots of engineers would build custom boards (there was a proto-board that would plug into the bus). There were two chassis that were made, one was a simple bent sheet aluminum chassis, with an 8-slot backplane, and banana plugs at one end for hooking up an external power supply that provided regulated +12, -12, +5 and -5VDC. The later form was also made from bent sheet aluminum, with a 4-slot backplane, and a built-in power supply.

Personal Anecdote

I have a lot of boards and chassis in my collection, along with documentation (schematics). I worked at Tektronix from 1977-1990, and bought and built many of these boards and chassis for various personal projects. One project was an early computer bulletin board system that served the Portland, Oregon user community, called the "Bit Bucket Bulletin Board", in the late 1970's and early 1980's, based on a BoardBucket system. It used the Motorola 6809 CPU board, two 5 1/4" floppy drives (single-sided, single-density), 64K of main RAM, a modified 64K RAM board that served as a solid-state disk (256K), an early SCSI 5 1/4" 10MB hard disk drive, the 300-baud modem board (later replaced with an external 2400-baud modem), a video interface/real-time clock board (which I designed). The system ran a customized version of Technical Systems Consultants' FLEX/09 operating system, and the BBS was written in TSC's BASIC. -- RickBensene?

The Old Calculator Web Museum

http://oldcalculatormuseum.com

rickb -at- bensene -dot- com