On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 6:50 PM Guy Dunphy via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > At the moment I'm not sure if my machine is an 'A-series' or not. How do I > tell? > It's a 2113E, apparently quite a late model. I've had it and related hardware > (minus disk drives) > since the early 2000's. It was a junkyard find. All in perfect condition > except one of the two > tape drives has a little 'forklift damage' to the front. I rescued it all > from being landfilled.
A 2113E is a 21MX E-Series. http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=109 A 2117F is a 21MX F-Series and looks identical, except for the color of the highlight stripe across the front panel, plus it should also be cabled to the floating point processor box. Internally it also has different firmware PROMs than the 2113E to use the floating point processor box. http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=110 Both the 2113E and 2117F have a large PCB mounted horizontally along the bottom of the chassis which implements the CPU core. Memory boards plug into the vertically mounted backplane from the front the chassis behind the front panel, and I/O boards plug into a separate vertically mounted backplane from the rear of the chassis. The memory and I/O boards are basically square, with single card edge connector that is almost the whole width of the card that plugs into the backplanes. The card edge connectors on the side opposite the backplane vary from board to board. If it has a front panel with switches and lights it is not an A-series. None of the A-series A400, A600/600+, A700, A900, A990 have front panels with switches and lights. Instead they have a VCP "Virtual Control Panel" console interface. The A-Series CPU, memory, and I/O boards are rectangular, and have two card edge connectors that plug into the backplane (except the A900 CPU board set, which uses pin-and-socket connectors only for the CPU board set). There is only a single backplane in an A-Series chassis that all of the CPU, memory, and I/O boards plug into. The A400 and A990 CPUs are single board, the A600/600+ is two boards for CPU and memory controller, the A700 is three or four boards for lower and upper CPU, memory controller, and optional FPP, the A900 is four boards for sequencer, data path, cache controller, and memory controller.
