VOGONS

Found weird ISA/PCI UART devices - What to do with it?

Topic actions

First post, by veelstekel

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

I bought a P3 yesterday with some unknown cards to me:

1. Was an ISA UART Card
It featured an kinda IDE connector on the back as well as 2 DB9 ports;
1 was labelled RS232, the other RS-485, it seems to be centered around a Zilog Z85C3010PSC chip.
It also featured an eprom chip with UV lens for clearing.

2. Was an PCI UART Card
Seems to be a IC133C-R2 with also 2 DB9 ports which could be configured as either RS422 or RS485.
When googling, it seemed to have been expensive at some point. (https://www.barcodesinc.com/black-box/part-ic133c-r2.htm)

Question is... What am I going to do with it?
Throw it away? Put it on ebay? Can I use this as "normal" COM ports in DOS? What can I do with this "IDE" kind of connector?
Why were these cards so expensive?

Reply 1 of 1, by eisapc

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Sure you can use these as RS232 if you find the right drivers for DOS.
RS485 is an industrial standard, so the boards might be expensive due to different qualification, low production count and because in industial measures they were not even expensive.
You might check if the EPROM is something to overcome any kind of BIOS limitation, but wondering why they used an ISA board for IDE in a PCI box?
Does the BIOS shows up something during boot or has any manufacturer information in its content?
Probably theprevious owner replaced some older hardware and kept the controller and the attached storage media?

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to General Old Hardware
Close window
Close window