I kinda had a very similar problem last week when I tried to identify some Tulip 286 ISA board, I asked about it on VCF here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … ip-286-ISA-card

And apparently there were basically 2 types of this kind of board: Computer upgrade cards and Computer-on-a-card and mine seemed to be the latter

Tetrium wrote:

I kinda had a very similar problem last week when I tried to identify some Tulip 286 ISA board, I asked about it on VCF here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … ip-286-ISA-card

And apparently there were basically 2 types of this kind of board: Computer upgrade cards and Computer-on-a-card and mine seemed to be the latter

Hey thanks for your post and info... your board looks awesome! I like big long ISA cards which lot's of the FPGA, and DIL chips on them, before they were all consolidated into a north/south bridge etc.

I would probably say that of the two... that the 386 EISA card is more likely an upgrade card used either with a back-plane or proprietary system. It's lacking a few things to be stand-alone as with the modern 386 / 486 Single Board Computers (SBC's) there are usually further expansion options like 30-pin simms for memory and I/O for IDE / Floppy etc or even a serial / PS/2 mouse port.

The notable features are a 66MHz crystal, FPU socket, AMI bios and cache... so it is limited somewhat and requires other parts of a system to be complete.

Question is... which system?

I managed to find the site I was looking for... https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/

which is an excellent resource when trying to ID old and rare HW.

On the 386 motherboard list: - https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/m386_i.htm

The closest I managed to find was this: - https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/A-B/34754.htm

The interface isn't the same and it seems to have a bit more cache banks than the EISA card but as yet, it's the closest I've come to finding a match.

I remember i had an AST 486 server that used dedicated CPU card. Compaq also had a lot of servers and desktops that had that, but With Compaq i think a spare part number always was printed.
AST, ALR and NEC also had 386 EISA systems.

386_junkie wrote:

Hey thanks for your post and info... your board looks awesome! I like big long ISA cards which lot's of the FPGA, and DIL chips […]
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Tetrium wrote:

I kinda had a very similar problem last week when I tried to identify some Tulip 286 ISA board, I asked about it on VCF here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … ip-286-ISA-card

And apparently there were basically 2 types of this kind of board: Computer upgrade cards and Computer-on-a-card and mine seemed to be the latter

Hey thanks for your post and info... your board looks awesome! I like big long ISA cards which lot's of the FPGA, and DIL chips on them, before they were all consolidated into a north/south bridge etc.

I would probably say that of the two... that the 386 EISA card is more likely an upgrade card used either with a back-plane or proprietary system. It's lacking a few things to be stand-alone as with the modern 386 / 486 Single Board Computers (SBC's) there are usually further expansion options like 30-pin simms for memory and I/O for IDE / Floppy etc or even a serial / PS/2 mouse port.

The notable features are a 66MHz crystal, FPU socket, AMI bios and cache... so it is limited somewhat and requires other parts of a system to be complete.

Question is... which system?

I think that Tulip board doesn't work anymore and on top of that I don't have the right hardware for it anymore. I kinda kept it because I think it looks awesome somehow. It's heavy too! 😁

It would've been nice to have some kind of ISA 286 board which could be used to downgrade a faster system...or perhaps even a PCI one though I don't know how this would actually be useful 😁

Tetrium wrote:

...or perhaps even a PCI one though I don't know how this would actually be useful 😁

Just to see if you can. 😎

Scraphoarder wrote:

I remember i had an AST 486 server that used dedicated CPU card. Compaq also had a lot of servers and desktops that had that, but With Compaq i think a spare part number always was printed.
AST, ALR and NEC also had 386 EISA systems.

Cheers for the info.

Yea, I have quite a few of the Compaq varieties... 5 different CPU cards for 3 different systems. I like Compaq.

Have been looking into AST and ALR. ALR seems quite close as well but can't seem to find much on their CPU/NPU cards. NEC I will look into next.

Thanks again.