Hi Pitcher, it's and 1980s and all these newfangled programmable devices were coming out. I Mean yeah, I Always had your traditional Eeproms with a little window on there where you could have raised them with UV and you had to program them. But things like our P or D started to come out. Another one-time programmable microcontrollers started to appear back then, but they didn't have the newfangled Flash technology and self programming and all that sort of thing.

and you wanted to program all these newfangled devices Well, it was a lot harder back then and you'd traditionally have. Maybe you know if you were short on budget, you might have a desktop machine that you know might have had a keypad on it something like this. and you can program your eeproms and a sort of like a limited selection of programmable devices back then. But what if you're a big company and you wanted to program everything you wanted? One of these newfangled universal programmers? What? What did you need? Well, let's check it out.

You needed one of these bad boys. This was the standard. the data sight, uni, sight, universal pin programmer. and this thing was the Ducks guts.

probably for probably several decades. Actually, this one came out in 1986 and it was the first programmable Universal pin programmer with removable cartridges. I'll show you all this in a minute. It all removes out.

You could program virtually any device on the market, even devices that hadn't been invented yet because Donna Rio were the leaders and they would guarantee that they would add new device support for anything that came out. And this puppy could literally program anything with the right type of physical adapter and things like that. And this was the industry standard benchmark programmer to a lot of people, it probably still is and at last have they supported this from 1986 when it first came out well into the 96 and into the 2000s as well. At first of all started having a data terminal attachment for it.

then they got Pet Dos Pc-based software for it, and then they progressed to Windows-based PC software and they just kept supporting this program because the hardware in here was so comprehensive and so universal and it could still program almost anything today pretty much as well. Um, it. but they have dropped Art now I Believe they've finally dropped a software support for this, but they kept supporting this device for several decades and this was the benchmark Universal program against which all the others were judged on the market fair. As I said, several decades.

And if you were serious, if you're sending your you know spray space probe to Jupiter or something and you had to make sure that your devices were programmed correctly you you used what are these babies? Because this one was A Even though it's not like multiple gained and things like that, this was a proper production programmer that would program the devices properly because a lot of these devices had to be if you wanted to actually program and test them properly, you had to program it not only the right voltage using the right protocol and the right signal levels and everything else, but then you had to verify them at different at the extremes of the voltage, rails and stuff like that and a a universal. A proper universal program like this bad boy could do it all ha ha. and I've always wanted to tear down one of these I used this in the late 80s and the mid 90s through to probably the early 2000s at companies I've worked for because it was just like the industry standard program. It cost an absolute fortune, but for any big company, this thing was an absolute necessity and I can remember I've never used the Windows later windows software I always use the DOS software and I think I ever used the terminal one.

But yeah, I use the DOS software for this thing and I have fond memories and I always wanted to take one apart. but I never I couldn't because it was all you know. It had the calibration seals and everything on it, you know? And and it was like the Holy Grail bit of equipment in the company and have its own section of the lab dedicated. It would be often run by somebody who knew how to use the thing.

You know, sometimes you couldn't just wander up. you know, some Johnny-come-lately come up and I want to program my chip. It was like no, you had to find the priest who operated this thing anyway. I'm not sure what the price for this puppy was back in the day, but if you had to ask the price, you couldn't afford it.

And it came with like the basic ZIF socket here, but all of these are actually are removable so we can actually just take these modules out like this. So this was your basic 40 pin dip one. Which would you know if you had just your dip packages? That's just fine and dandy. But you know if you wanted to program your P or CC packages and stuff like that, you needed one of these adapters in here? Oh, look at that bad boy and we'll take a closer look at these.

But yeah, you could actually not only replace that, but you could also replace swap out the entire module like that. Absolutely beautiful and you get they made adapters for absolutely anything and data. I/o were the industry leaders in this and probably still higher. I Mean if you want probably the best programmers on the market, you're probably still gonna buy him from Data I/o and of course companies like this would like you would have contracts with and they would guarantee to add support for the parts you wanted and full production support and it was properly done and verified and everything.

None of this you know Shenzhen market ebay programmers and stuff like that the software may or may not work. No, these were fully verified and tested and certified. So anyway, if you do know the price of one of these back in the day, please let us know. and I've been looking for one of these on eBay for a while, but there are rare as hen's teeth in Australia But one of my viewers I'm just randomly emailed me out of the blue and said hey, they were throwing this in the dumpster.

um would you land I saved it I Just couldn't let them throw it out. Would you like it? Yes please thank you very much. So it comes from me, a secret squirrel organization that well shall not be named. Its secret squirrel.

Not only do we have the base unit itself, but we also have another doctor look at this. I mean these things would have cost a fortune back in the day PGA Your pin grid array one so you can get all these different bases I'm not sure you know what they actually ultimately went up to. that's 1991. There you go made in the US See USC Fantastic! So that would have cost a fortune and also all these adapters look probably still unused.

How much would these? Of course you know, hundreds of dollars each back in the day, but these were adapters for your different size. You know, if you wanted a fifty-two pin PLC See, you would buy the adapter for it and just snap it in Beauty! So this was actually a fully self-contained unit, had its own operating system ran on a 68000 processor. It's got your floppy drives here. one I think you would like usually like the operating system disk to actually run it and the other would be the algorithm disk the programming disk that you'd actually whack in and you'd actually will see on the back.

You can hook it up to either a data terminal and old-fashioned you know, serial data terminal or in more modern times a PC running Dos or Windows software but it was still completely standalone. You just needed like a terminal to you know to show your stuff on the screen and say you know put in algorithm disk number five that supports the part that you wanna die if fun memories are doing that. But so excited I Always want to tear one of these things down and this is going to have a lot of switching circuitry. hence the huge massive size of this because it is a true Universal pin programmer so it's going to have like a reed relays switching on every one of the pins that you can switch through multiple programming voltages because you got to remember back in the day you know these Eproms could and in fact this one, no that one doesn't have it, but this one here has the voltage written on it.

There we go. the program in voltage twelve Point Five volts. But of course you wouldn't just program at Twelve Point Five Volts. There be verification runs at different voltages and stuff like that, so you know a lot of the even the older Eeproms they went up to.

our twenty one or even twenty Five Volts if memory serves me correctly for a lot of the old school ones. So this will die as support voltages at least up to that. and it's bad boy. I'm It's shaped like this because it's going to have all the cards in here.

the pin switching in IO cards. but let's take a look at the back. look at this old-school Dt U U typical switches for DC E and D Te hands up if you remember that, data communications equipment, data terminal equipment and you could actually hook it up to an old you know, Vt100 terminal and still use this puppy. Anyway, this one was manufactured in 1987, so this came out in 1986.

so this is. you know, it's just a year after it came out, so it's basically one of the original puppies. Love it, Redmond Washington and one of the most interesting aspects of this was as I said, this removable system like this which was fantastic and but all you do not touch pins. oh sorry I'm gonna touch them I'm brave little pogo pins in there I Don't know why they're not all populated.

Maybe if you've got more IO cards in there. actually you know this one had only support X number of pins. If you wanted to buy like a higher pin count version, you could do that and probably have more pins and different adapters and stuff like that. but all the little like pogo pins in there.

but I Always found fascinating. One of the most interesting things was actually this pad in here. How would you? actually? where are the contacts? Where's Wally? Try and find Wally in there. Hmm I Think you can probably tell what's going on here, but you would actually plug in your PLC C chip and it actually conduct through this conducting map so you'd have this 44 pin PLC see attachment for example.

That would be a classic one and you just work it in there like that. then you open it up and tada, you just actually put your chip in there. So these adapters just had a like a spongy thing on the top just to put pressure down on the chip and then a certain size window which would then are exposed contacts on the PCB underneath You put your chip in there. you'd work it down like that and it would conduct through those pads.

Let's take a look at those conducting pads under the microscope because it actually came with spare ones. Awesome! So check it out! We've got the conductive pad replacement kit and I don't know how much these were the cost but yeah, like these things would have, you would change these after I Think they had like a couple of thousand you know, cycles and stuff. So what it is, let's see if we can go all the way with LBJ here and see what we've got. It's just like little conductive gold flex or whatever that are isolated of course like insulated from each other.

but they're just like a random gold flecks and you would actually conduct these things and that would actually conduct through there and connect the pads top and bottom. and that's pretty much it. So it was kind of a crude, but I was very effective because I never had any problems whatsoever with the contacts on these things that are fantastic. There we go.

That's perhaps a more interesting view. You can actually see the conductive paths right through there. That's great. Love it! A beautiful concept to come up with that.

you know, how do you for a universal thing that could connect to almost any chip using you know, whether it was PLC C or whether it was you know, a land grid array or something, you know, any sort of you know even BGA stuff and things like that? You know with the contacts on the bottom you could do anything just using on these conductive mats. It's the same way. not quite so I Know you want to see what's under here so let's take it. sure this is the correct technique for taking it out.

I'm going to I'm going to brutalize it. There you go and it just had that Universal contact type pad and of course all you know real top-quality gold plating that the colors beautiful. and course you could put any size P or CC on there with that particular pitch. And of course if you wanted a different picture, a different pen count or whatever it was a different style package, you'd buy another hole adapter like this because well, you know you got to upsell.

But yep, these were so professionally designed and manufactured. These things were bulletproof. worth every cent. And I've been told by Secret Squirrel that this one is actually faulty.

but anyway, we don't care about it working. now all we care about is what's inside this bad boy. You know we say you're on the Eevblog, don't turn it on, take it apart. First of all, I Want to see what's inside? These? Are there any circuitry in there? Is there any protection? Is there any pin driver stuff? Let's find out what.

Nope. There we go. it fell out. Oh geez, doesn't look to be much in there, does there? Is that gonna gonna pop out? Yep, it's all a through hole of course.

I Know, look at that relays relays as far as the eye can see. Beautiful! GI Clare Never heard of those but they're obviously gonna be top quality ones. Data: I/o wouldn't have skimped and we're probably going to find. Oh yeah, really.

drive is classic. you will and 2803 that they're the ones with the built-in back. EMF Diode protection. So you got relay drivers and then just 7/4 HC stuff dating from 86 there.

Nothing fancy. Oh, that's a bit. how are you doing well? those diode arrays I Guess you could buy those diet arrays. There you go.

So that would have had like diode protection on each one of the pins. Wow Groovy. They obviously had even. they had them custom manufactured for them or they were like maybe goodbye Diane arrays in that sort of single inline package form factor.

Either way, of course that's a full layer board. It's even got the old-school lay account designator their 1986 for those playing along at home and got some. LEDs So we got the yeah yep we got the light pipe up there nicely design I Went to town and a little ferrite beads Jesus Serious about keeping the EMC yeah what they ferrite bead in series. we every line go on to that I Oh Anyways Sim for it's just all seven for HC Doesn't look to be any custom our pal stuff on there at all.

So all the magic is. well most of the magic. This is just like a pin switching your various voltages. do we have 42 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 Only 28 relays did this one only support a 28 pin device? It's got a 40 pin zip-zip socket, zero insertion force socket genuine 3m text tool yes it is.

Ah 3m. Let's play along at home or you text tool fanboys and you just know this baby's going to work. It was tested by Doug G good on you Doug And the main adapter Oh this bad boy. Bobby Dazzler We're gonna sell some Toshiba pass down here now.

these are be programmable devices surely I mean I look genuine budge wire than that Wow Fantastic going all the way with LBJ up the top. Beautiful! Anyway, that's the chicken and egg thing. how would they have program these things at their previous generation programmer? And yep, sure enough, these are a Toshiba CMOS gate or a chip. So basically you know, equivalent to like an FPGA these days.

One one-time programmable puppies, no doubt and they would have I'm sure data I/o being the programming people, they would have used their own hardware to program this. and of course this was our fancy pantsy. we're talking odd look at this Esso package surface mount stuff. for the most part the only through all stuffing this is the connectors in the relays.

Awesome, You know I'm not familiar with that relay off the bat, but no doubt they would have been no really good. I'm actually surprised not to find Reed relays in here. These look like your traditional our mechanical relays but of course you didn't have to like. It's not like they switch these for you, your data and stuff like that.

They didn't need that many cycles. All they were switching was basically are the voltage through to a particular pin. So these are done switch you know, once or a couple of times during the programming of any particular pen. After that, then they'd actually you know the data just came through data level buffers and things like that which they could adjust the level of.

But apart from that, Yeah, because they didn't need high cycle count on these relays. but I'm sure they're top quality and on the back of the board there, there's not a huge amount. there's just a bunch of resistors. They look like caps, but they're actually not there.

they're resistors. Were at a couple of simple old-school seven for LS with a Bajra sister on it. No worries. Um, but just a bunch of resistors on there.

And also I miss the little individual driver transistors down in there. It'll drive at Renny's for each one. Of course these would all be the relay drivers upperworld. It's just like serial interface relay drivers with then the individual were to drive each one.

But there you go. Brilliant. It's a lot of engineering that goes into that though now. I'd be surprised if this puppy wasn't designed to come apart real easy because you could I don't know if as user upgradeable, but you could certainly you know, buy the base model and then upgrade it later with more pin card capability and stuff like that.

I Believe this thing might be fully loaded, so a little bit of coercion, but there we go. Ah oh, we're in like Flynn it would be Moon I didn't show you the awesome part. Ah, look at that. Wow isn't that gorgeous? Look at the pin driver cards.

Yeah, it suck. It's fully populated. Alright, that's pit wedding stuff. Look at it.

Beautiful. Of course all the pin driver cards are going to be absolutely identical, but all that processing goodness beautiful thing of beauty is a joy forever. This is interesting property of H&R Inc. Does a Silicon Software? Does anyone know the story behind this? Obviously these are the roms.

Add a code of 87 there even though it's copyright 95? Um, it did they hire Silicon Software to write it? Is it is a subsidiary or whatnot. Anyway, we've got some programmable devices here and oh, look at our beautiful little budge there on the pin. Yep. I Think we have a genuine lifted pin there or they've chopped it off.

Have they beautiful? Oh Remove the kernel test. Interesting. So we just got some jumpers in there. more programmable you know.

Gal type our devices here and of course it's all like seven for LS seven for HC Staff Another another genuine budge. there are seven accept a seven for F for the screaming 40 megahertz clock on there. That was pretty fast back in the day. You know what do you is that you'd be using your seven for F stuff for that it's into.

Always interesting to note on these tear downs which chips have selective sockets on them? Look at this: 74 LS are 245 I'm not sure if that's a repair or if it's a production mod. I'm not sure you know I don't think they would have repaired all those. so you know some symbol for LS 2 four fours, 3 seven threes Classic stuff 74 LS 86 Over there you've got your Xor gate and you know they've got. well it's a few of them in sockets they'd like look to be coming out.

have to go around and give those the old press 1 to. But yeah they got a few extras over there so they may you know decided hey, maybe those ones you know there's advantages to taken out either for our testing, debugging, or repair purposes. Maybe they're driving stuff they expected them to fire or whatnot. Hmm.

and the 68000 fan boys have just Creed in their pants I think and there it is rubbed off. People have been intimate. Hmm. Anyway, that little mod there is on the address select pin so it's come from this 74 F over here.

Of course they need to address it real quick. So yeah, they use the F Series logic if it's fast. if you didn't know, and yet. So there's like tuck the ferrite bead with a resistor, go into there.

And of course, you got your classic multi-layer board routing. here. you can actually see well, the square traces in there, like that all the electrons are going to fall out. This is most likely order around because no self-respecting designer would add right angles to their traces like that.

And of course, all the chips are all lined up in the same vertical direction like this. and all the traces almost all of them run vertical on the top side of the PCB and on the bottom side. Of course they'll run horizontal across the board like that. That just gives you your best around in.

but look, it's not one of them out of place. I Like it, not one little oddball one mounted at right angles. Beautiful. and that's a six layer job.

II There you go. You can tell by the layer count down here, one, two and then you progressively can't see them because they're on the bottom layer. So of course they would have had a huge five on Tralee near so. I dedicated ground, dedicated 5 volts.

The rest probably would have been. Oh, you might have done our power routing and they've done some pin routing and stuff like that. Here on the top you can see all the pins. Looks like you only had to populate maybe these boards here if you wanted the 40 pin dip interface, but if you wanted the expanded one, don't know where the extra traces are over on this side, but maybe they're on different layers or something like that.

and that's a reason why you'll find mod wires on these type of designs. Back then. it was really expensive too, You know? Reis pin these boards and you'll find issues later. And these things weren't manufactured by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or something you know, so you could easily add manual mods like that at the production stage, you know.

But bages like that? No worries whatsoever. Steeper than now. tree spinning the ball, that's for sure. Check out the beefy power we've got here I'm pinned drivers and all this processing must take some grunt and the bottom looks like it's just gonna have power supply in it.

mm-hmm There might be a lot of wasted volume in here, although you got your floppy drives of course. And very curiously, it also came with this expansion ram board too. So uh, I don't know that mounted under the bottom or something like that, perhaps? Anyway, alright, someone pilfered the RAM because it was expensive back then. Still is high.

Yes, it must plug into here and melt under the bottom somewhere. In fact, I can see another board under there. It came with a base amount of RAM Not sure what it is, but for those playing along at home who love their RAM part numbers, knock yourself out. By far the most interesting thing inside this is the pen driver card.

Once again, we see that Toshiba our CMOS gate array there, but this one dates from 89. Love the right angle dual inline point, one edge header there with the soldered on boards. They're very rugged. Love that! Yes, it is actually a dual row.

It plugs into the second row down the bottom there as well, but these would have cost a fortune. And check out the density in this thing. Wow Look at that! This is a brilliant layout and it's so hats off to who it has ever laid this puppy out to try and get all that density into that like would be much room left. Would have been tearing their eyes out trying to layout that puppy.

Anyway, very very nice. We got ourselves some power transistors down here. 305 5. You should be familiar with those.

Fantastic! They've got some just some Mylar under their insulating sheet. These obviously aren't dissipating any power. See these flapping around in the breeze, you know? I Don't like the To-220 flapping around in the breeze, but yeah, you? okay? I don't like it anyway. they haven't secured them down, but it's fine.

This thing's you know design does sit on a bench, not designed to be moved around and vibrated and stuff like that. And but I Love the custom heat sink up the top here. looks like we've got some IRF 97 something or others there so we've got some sort of power MOSFET there. What are these little puppies? They drive us for the MOSFET now after, look those up.

so I couldn't find any data on that if I do I'll link it in later in the Edit But anyway, look, there's a very interesting point 2 8, 5 ohm 1% resistor. that's obviously some sort of current sense resistor. So maybe this is some current sense amplifier and look I think they've got a guard trace going right around all those top 4 pins there. so maybe that's some sort of you know amplifier for thee that they're obviously doing some pin current sense in there.

Hmm. and we found it for MOSFETs There you got a wonder. Is this like a four channel card and on the bottom here, I got another four. Look at that.

they look like bipolar jobs and yep, that just must be a quad pin driver just based on the configuration there. And that kind of makes sense because there's actually well. I Was gonna say there's 16 cards here, but there's actually 17 cards. so 16 times 4 is gives you 64 pianet capability.

Why they've got the extra card I don't know. 17 still 16 more. That creeps me out, but this is just insane. All this to drive four pins.

You can see the complexity. If you want to do this properly, you know these Universal programmers these days of it have done tear downs of like a cheap $50 ebay one which is you know, fine these days, but it just it doesn't hold a candle to these. You know, these old-school ones which did it properly. You know these were professionally engineered to basically drive any pin at any voltage and it's just wow.

How can I find the schematic for this and go through it? and hi as I start to take these boards out, they've all been like mixed and much different flavors. The chip over here is a PMI PM three double V and that's a J FET input op amp so that makes sense with the with that guard ring that we saw around there. But I've got various odd dates on these and I spread it in at least a couple of years apart. I Don't see any real differences in them apart from actual you know, brand differences in the chips and stuff like that.

Maybe you know, some part substitutions, but no, it doesn't look like any board modification changes or anything like that. and as a secret squirrel told me this thing, it doesn't actually pair up doesn't seem to do anything. So I've got actually the cards removed here and let's switch it on. Watch the LEDs over here and there you go.

The power LED just flashed and that was it. Thankfully there's some test points here, just kind of test them with all the cards out, so get a minimum load on there. All right, we'll just measure some stuff. Oh, that's already on.

Oh well, that's supposed to be a 12 volt test point. Definitely got it on. Yep, it's supposed to be a 48 volt test point. 5 volts? What? No sausage? I Mean you know if you don't get your 5 volts, you're not gonna boot it.

Minus 5 volts and there's a 2.5 volts. but they did nothing. I'm just trying to get this board out here and I should expect with a huge multi-way connectors like these Windy, you know there's a lot of force when you actually press down. You know users will just slam them in.

These are actually rigidly mounted, so taking the screws out of the board you can see that it's maybe you can see the bow on that. Obviously it's held down with these are steel pins right at the connector. Nice design, otherwise it'll be yeah. horrible force on the joints and everything else.

so they've done that well. Tell you what, this, This whole design is quite complicated. We've got two dueling line right and headers up here going up to this board. Don't know what the hell that thing's doing, but it's good that you don't have to take out the jacks for the D20 fives, but you got a sort of you know you can easily slide that in and Bend the pins or do what not.

But yeah. I don't know. Yes, like they could have done something else with that board. Tada.

Ah, main board out or I better bloody turn off the power. Here you go. Warning: High voltage. Jeez.

they don't even over an insulating sheet on that bad boy. But there you go. Nothing in the bottom except as I said all the traces gone vertical. Cut my bod y z-- But there you go.

Yeah, the rest of the pins over here aren't populated. Oh, it's interesting that they just like power and other stuff. Maybe for future expandability for a different motherboard or something, perhaps? Mmm. Anyway, that's a big-ass board.

You certainly need a serious business power supply for a bad boy like this that. God our God Nippon chemi-con caps. Look at that. no red, they go faster.

s XC Series For those playing along at home, they all look in no good Nick All the vents is no bulges, all the vents looker. Well, the vents look good and got our souls some power. Trinis along there there's more power trainees along this wall down here and just look at the look at the compound. it's all over the shop.

Somebody had fun. Jeez, what they did spray paint that on. Anyway, it's all very neat and tidy. Then we come over.

Brag. Oh yes, brag there mains, filter caps on the input DC rectified side: There's our rectifier down there. Of course there's our bridge and everything looks Hankey Don't worry, you know it's not up to modern standards of course, but you know, power supply from the 1980s fuses intact down in there. but I don't see any visual signs of distress I don't smell anything.

So hmm. we're getting zero volt sellers puppy I Don't know. Aha found out what the back board does dead giveaway down in that corner look waveform board. so that must generate the programming there.

quiet, you know, waveform slash you know, in quote marks, programming sequence for the particular pin that they're currently pulsing. Hmm. that's interesting. It's got a bunch of yeah, where are those up there? You almost look like memory SRAM Chips No, those are actually PM 75 45 these are 12 bit Dax So this can actually generate analog waveforms, presumably like to control.

Maybe the slope? That's it. You know that's a pretty over the engineered way to do it. Maybe the like, the slope of the program impulse or something like that. because or is it you know? truly? so Universal that it supports weird ass analog things I Don't know anyway that that dates from copyright 85, down in, then it made in USA and down in here.

We've got some my analog devices: a D7, double two sixes there, a quad 8-bit DAC So I decks all over the place. it's full of Dax Alright, let's have a quick look at the schematic for the waveform generator. here. it's three pages.

check this out. but the so let's go up to the first page here up here in the corner. Good our soul CR Voltage references 88 V 1 and the usual wire transistor driver for that. No workers.

We've got some point five percent resistors that doesn't have to be hugely or 0.1% You know it doesn't have to be hugely accurate, but yeah, I would figure. Yeah, if you're designing something like this, you know you want to be five point. and when you know you want to be low five volt supply plus minus point one or or something like that. Anyway, here's our - Dax Seventy five, Forty five and we've got a looks like we've got a transistor output driver here.

Check it out 2905 s and then they're just then they're driving, not some higher power ones. So this is for yet the device under ten test. VCC So that's the VCC for the chip and VCC since so we're since not back. Are we? What the yeah? Jesus Serious business for generating.

You know this is always just to generate the five out. The VCC rail for your device under test. Amazing! Now we've got three more Dax here generating three different reference voltages. Where are these Power bus, comparator bus, analog bus What The Okay, so it's the analog bus that contains the device under test.

Uh, VCC and all the different reference voltages generated from these three different 12-bit Dax Wow underlay. Well, let's go down to the over voltage crowbar. Look at that, and where's that? Where's that between 442 volts? Okay, so that must be the absolute maximum capability of this thing. Anything over that, it will absolutely clamp it down with a proper crowbar, just turns on the SCR and and you know, just shorts everything out to protect your device under test.

Beautiful! So these are our positive and negative supplies are they: + O OC - Oh See what? local high and logic low supplies. Okay, so these must be the voltages for the the the logic levels of the device under test. So if it's a 3.3 volt part for example, then they're obviously generating those by looks of it. plus 21 volts fine current clamp.

So it's got all these current references fcor so what can it drive? It could drive constant currents into pins. presumably. that's amazing. Unbelievable over current integrator, slew rate reference so can actually control the slew rate.

And that's so not unexpected to be able to control the slew rate. I think I might have mentioned that before. The ability to do that on the program in rails and of course current supply Wow That's great. That is unbelievable.

So all that that waveform board just like that's got more in it than what probably any other universal program are currently on the market. except for you know, the ultra high-end once. Unbelievable. And here we go.

I've actually got the description in the maintenance slash service manual. The primary function the waveform board is to produce several individually controlled voltages for use by the pin drivers. These voltages provide the pin drivers with power to operate the service reference levels, to control the pin drivers, and provide voltages which are either re regulated and applied to the part being programmed or switch their entirely. That doesn't tell you much, does it? So are these all the different levels that it can generate.

Still doesn't really raw voltages. Wow I'll have to link in all this stuff down below. Great bedtime reading. There you go, you can read that to your heart's content.

The functional operation for all this stuff. Don't make them like this anymore and just look at the capability they've added here. The FC LC power supply is to set a clamp voltage on the pin drivers output when the pin drivers find current sources sinking current. Unbelievable.

Like, you know 99% of the devices out there will not need this to be able to actually program them. but this is a true Universal programmer and then the other one is for the find. does the same similar thing but for the fine current source. Unbelievable.

And you know they've got 12 bit Dax to do this. and then they've also got a dedicated clamp voltage as well. So that that's what those diodes were on the you know there's single inline package, diodes were declared the individual pins. They actually program the voltage that goes onto the common of those diodes so that the pins cannot go like not 0.6 volts above whatever you program the clamp voltage to be.

That's fantastic and it looks like the power supply is from Computer products. Boshart Incorporated certified by manufacturer to comply with IEC 3 for 8 thank you very much. It's not a quick poke around in the power supply and cleaned it up and I've put it back. there wasn't anything obvious so that'll have to be a separate video troubleshooting that cuz I'd love to get this baby up and running because I have no doubt all the digital stuff it all still works.

All the pin driver boards that still work I've no no doubt if we got the power supply up and pretty confident this sucker and uh, you know, still work floppies. Yeah, they're pretty reliable 720 k floppies in there. I'd still work a treat. and if we actually have a look at the the newfangled task link software because I didn't always use this task links offered and where they got that name from, but it used to use the high rise software it was called that's the one I used back in the day and that was not any terminal but like a DOS based Us software.

Anyway, you could also get our task link for dos as well and then they progress over to Windows and this software. support of the different systems of course. and the Uni site stuff down here. and this software dates from 97.

this is version now 3.1 or something like that. But if we go in and we actually select device, it's actually quite telling in what it supports here. I Mean let's go down to something that might be familiar to you youngsters out there, which would be some microchip stuff for example. So these did support micro control.

Can I just type in microchip. that'd be easier, wouldn't it microchip? There we go. And it did support microchip microcontrollers as well as microchip memory. And you know II squared prom, and EEPROM and everything else.

Back in the day, you'll notice that they're all like the sixteen Twelve, see that they're all the CE versions. they're some of the A Squared proms I Believe there are, but yeah, there's You'll notice that there's what's missing is some of the new F-series stuff which of course use. You know there's a 17 series, but they're all see the one-time programmable or the either the one-time program will type all the reprogrammable type E squared prom version so they don't support any of the flesh stuff because that's I think Was there one? There are? There was a couple. Okay, the sixteen F-84 was basically the first flash programmable micro on the market I think and it's the one that you know changed everything.

Mace basically make microcontrollers of what you think of them today with the building reprogrammable flash memory. and that's pretty much when you know not just the microchip parts, but other types of microcontrollers started getting their own built-in programming stuff. He didn't have to apply a high voltage external pulse like he did with some of the early 16 C series pic stuff. you have to actually apply a higher voltage you couldn't just program and with your 5 volts of your 3.3 volt system voltage.

But once they changed over to the flash memory and they had built-in boost voltage, you know it just took care of everything for you inside the chip and all you did is you hook up your 5 volts or your 3.3 volt signal to there and you know Bob's your uncle it. You could program this using a $10 you know, serial parallel adapter or something like that. You didn't need these big Universal programmers that knew how to test these things over you know, at the right voltage with the right algorithm and everything else. Everything else was every.

The programming stuff was all handled inside the chip. So that's pretty much when these Universal programmers became less relevant in terms of being able to actually properly support the algorithms for all the different types of fire chips and the both voltage and data algorithm type stuff. So yeah, that's pretty much where it ended, you know. But apart from that, you probably wouldn't notice anything different with the universal programmer software that you'd get these days for your cheap you know, fifty dollar programmers and things like that.

It has the you know, step by step processes that blank check the program device and verify device and stuff like that. But in the case of these Universal programmers it could actually put when it verified, it could actually put extremes of the voltage rails in there and verified over a much wider range and things like that. So yeah, this thing was the Ducks guts back in the day. So although you can buy Universal programmers these days in quote marks, they're not quite the same thing as these old-school Universal programs which could generate almost any voltage and put it onto any pin.

in any configuration and things like that, this thing wasn't necessarily the fastest thing out there. not by a stretch. but if you wanted to program a device properly and have it guaranteed certified reliable, then this was the way to do it. So there you go.

I Hope you enjoyed that vintage teardown of the classic data. I/o uni, site programmer and this baby was the reference standard. First several decades Unbelievable. the support that they had behind this and unbelievable the amount of effort they went to do I design a true universe so our program at all.

You know that's there's four channels like. compare that with a modern teardown of a little tiny Universal programmer I've done that You know it's which is OK from today's modern devices. but you know, if you truly want to cover everything on the market from you know, the 70s onwards then only something like this would do the job really. But as always like you know you can get similar capabilities to these these days as technologies marching on.

you. can you know you get this in a small form-factor USB interface all the rest of all the works and stuff like that. But you know modern devices. You know you don't need a program and program them with, you know, twenty-something volts and stuff like that, so it's a little bit different.

It's sort of like a backward compatibility thing, but you know, if you want to program modern stuff then you know just this little mini Pro that I've done a video and teardown on or something like this. you know, well on one which are universal. programmers for modern devices don't have nearly the same capability as something like this, but for modern stuff more than good enough. It's all in the software pretty much.

You know. the interface to actually drive the chip isn't isn't that hard at all. just a bunch of us serial drivers and protection and whatnot. and Bob's your uncle.

But yeah, you can't beat that. That was the Ducks Gus until a lot of people which still is. Hands up if you had one these. Hands up.

if you still use it uh, or maybe a later variant of it, discuss down below And as always, if you liked it, please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time.