Mystery PDP-11

Posted <2017-10-29 Sun 14:44> by Aaron S. Jackson.

I was sent a mystery PDP-11 from Finland (thank you JT). It was taken from an old Nokia Automation plant many years ago, built by Unimation. Hence, many of the cards are used for such applications. Here are all the cards, and some information (if I can find any) in order (top left to bottom right).

M7270 18 bit CPU

F056, it has 32x HM4334P-4 CMOS (TTL compatible) RAM chips. So, 16KB, I think. This is not an official Q-bus card, so maybe something made by Unimation. It looks like they once had batteries but fortunately they have been ripped out, likely saving the machine from an early death.

F056, we have a 32KB now.

M8043 4-line async serial controller

Unimation 16 EPROM card.

ACAC 1664ATTL 64 bit parallel I/O card. I guess this was controlling some automation related things…

M8043 4 channel async serial card, standard DEC.

Some undescribed board with two large IDC connectors. Unless this is a Q-bus extender.

Now things get weird because the next cards are plugged into a second backplane which I am assuming is not Q-bus, but something controlled by the previously mentioned card.

This board is also undescribed but connects to the Q-bus card. I guess it carried data to the following automation related boards.

Unimation SERVO-6D, I don't know. I googled it and saw some stuff about robot control. It doesn't have any outputs.

Unimation SERVO-6D

Unimation SERVO-6D

Unimation SERVO-6D

Some sort of output board. It has a very large IDC connector. Probably something to do with the previous SERVO-6D cards.

So, who knows what I will do with this machine. It will be a lot of fun though, so if I can get it to poke the servo boards I'll try and get it to do something interesting. I'm going to keep an eye out for a logic analyzer because trying to figure out what this stuff does without documentation might be quite hard.

This PDP-11 does not have a built in power supply. I think I will try and build one from an ATX power supply which uses the same connector going into the back, just to keep things are original as possible.

Exciting stuff!

I managed to find a PDF of the manual for the Unimation Puma 700 series robots on scribd, which I have uploaded to Archive here. There are some nice diagrams, so I've included them below. It's quite interesting to see how the machine would have been used.

Back of the PDP-11, or is it the front?

The robot and system hooked up

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