S3 VGA Technical Reference Manuals (86C928 and Trio64V+)

S3 must have been some of the earliest accelerated Super VGAs and were the speed kings of their day.  Their early products we're named along the lines of Porche models to hint at speed.

According to this interesting post the S3 products share a lot architecture wise with the 8514.  This is not altogether surprising. ATI "Mach" products were also "inspired" by the 8514 which was one of the earliest fixed function graphics accelerators for the PC.  Nowadays the kids call these "GPUs" but we never called them that back then.

S3 data was hard to come by, they were quite secretive.  This like most of my data sheets comes courtesy of the excellent bitsavers project.  I only put them here for a personal collection and to add some hosting diversity.

Here is the technical reference manual for 86C928 GUI Accelerator from 1992.

Later, S3 would follow very successful highly integrated Trio 64 which was included on a lot of motherboards.  Previous to this S3 had been quite expensive, so I think the Trio 64 was their attempt to take on the value players like the superb Cirrus Logic Alpine family.

Download the Trio64V+ Integrated Graphics Video Accelerator Manual  from 1995.

Cirrus Logic: Alpine VGA Family CLGD543X/4X Technical Reference Manual

Cirrus used to publish these manuals directly on their FTP site (a very friendly company Cirrus, I always found).  This is the definitive one covering their excellent Alpine range of accelerated VGAs.

This covers such chips as the 5434 and 5446 among others.

Cirrus Logic: Alpine VGA Family CLGD543X/4X Technical Reference Manual

3Com Shrine

This museum site has a collection of the venerable 3Com Etherlink NICs.  In my teens at college my first cards I became familiar with were the NE2000, and I personally had an ICL EtherTeam (Fujtisu controller) but I could never get it to work.  By the time LAN cards were common fodder I had various 3Coms.  Always solid cards as I recall, everyone liked the 3Com cards (or maybe its my memory playing tricks).

Having a look at the boards and with some guessing, we can say some things about the different versions.

Most of the cards have a gate array for interfacing an Ethernet controller with the ISA bus and allowing the PC to control the device.  The gate arrays come in a few different versions and in more than one case is marked as an AT&T made part.

If you fancy a go at programming the Etherlink II you can download the manual here.

Etherlink I

Gate Array: 0755-02
Ethernet Controller: SEEQ DQ8001 EDLC Etherlink Data Controller (this appears to be where the name Etherlink orginates from in the series).

Etherlink I 16

Gate Array: Xilinx (FPGA?)
Ethernet Controller: Intel N82586

Etherlink II Rev A

Gate Array: 3588-01
Ethernet Controller: NAT Semi DP8390BN Ethernet Controller

Etherlink II Rev C

Gate Array: 3588-02
Ethernet Controller: NAT Semi DP83901AV Ethernet Controller

Etherlink II Rev K

Gate Array: 3588-02
Ethernet Controller: NAT Semi DP8390BN Ethernet Controller

Etherlink II 16 (3C503-16)

Gate Array: 3588-03

Ethernet Controller: NAT Semi DP83901AV Ethernet Controller

Now people my age at least, all had the ultra ubiqutious:

Etherlink III (3C509)

Controller: 14-01303????

Ultra integrated almost single chip solution, - everything has been put into the custom chip that says as many will remember.. "Parallel Tasking".  It's another AT&T made chip.  So presumably this is the gate array, and all the glue logic and the Ethernet controller (don't know which one..) all bundled onto one IC.

Etherlink III EISA (3C579)

Controller; AT&T made 8350-03

Etherlink III EISA (3C592)

Controller; AT&T made "Parallel Tasking" chip 40-02032??

Tokenlink

Wow!  Complicated beast this, looks like it would have been pricey too!

Controller: Texas Instrument TMS38030 System Interface Chip?

Quite a different beast this one (to be expected, as its Token Ring).  Based on a Texas Instruments chip set.  There is a TMS38030 controller, a TMS38010 Communications Processor, a TMS38021 Protocol Handler chip,  TMS38051 and TMS38052 Ring interface pair, and what look to be two TI gate arrays, stamped with "LBASIC" and "PCASIC", and both are stamped 3COM also.

3C905 PCI (10/100Mbit)

Moved onto the "Parallel Tasking II 'Performance'" chip now.  Fast Ethernet.

COP410L/COP411L/COP310L/COP311L Single-Chip N-Channel Microcontrollers

Part of my Datasheet archive series:

COP410L/COP411L/COP310L/COP311L Single-Chip N-Channel Microcontrollers Datasheet PDF

Cheap VPS Recommends

If you're after a Cheap VPS by a clueful provider, you can do a lot worse than these fellows.  I've had my Ramhost VPS for almost one year now (my renewal has just come up), and have been really happy with the service.  Superb uptime, decent performance, only had to do one support request (have them setup my reverse DNS as I remember) and it went through like a breeze.

Connexant L28 Microcontroller

This is the PDF Datasheet for the L28 Microcontroller it is based on the 6502 and is found used in Modem's AFAIK.

Toshiba TLCS-47

I'm doing a datasheet series of blogs where I post up the random interesting chips I have in my data sheet archive for downloading.

Today we have this little beasty, its a 4-bit Toshiba Microcontroller.