It's part of an early cad/cam system that helped engineers design PCB layout. The Gerber file specifies all aspects of a printed circuit board, including the conductor tracks, component location, solder mask, silkscreen for device legends, and drill data. Functionally, it's the same process in use today for pcb's. The 9-track tape was industry standard storage 40 years ago and used a simple 8-bit data field plus parity bit. The stuff you have is just the plotter driver section and not an actual computer. But it is a nice bit of history.
You can make or buy a small transformer that upconverts 120 to 240v to do a power on with a standard outlet as long as it doesn’t draw more than about 2kW.
This is a plotter driver, not necessarily for PCBs. When I was a young boy, my first job was with a ship building company as a computer operator. We had a large format Gerber flatbed plotter. It used Mylar instead of paper on a vacuum hold down bed and ink pens. The engineers would design the ship structures on an IBM 370 mainframe computer and output the plot files to mag tape. I would then have to load the tape on the plotter to plot out the file. It was a pain in the ass and took forever. You almost never could operate the plotter at full speed because, depending upon the complexity of the plot, the pens would clog or run out of ink. Sometimes you would catch it, interrupt the plot and change the pen. Most of the time it would go too far, and you would have to start over. The engineers waiting for the plots were not too pleased, and I was the one to get yelled at. I guess, for the time, it was pretty high-tech.
That tape drive is a Kennedy that has been rebadged by Gerber. Looks like a 9200 or a 9000 (less the formatter). It's just a stock 9-track drive, nothing exciting. The panel that is covered is a maintenance panel that you do not use under normal operation. Tape the panel over to keep operators from fiddling with it! I think that these units didn't actually have a computer in them, in the sense of a von neumann machine. What's is in that card cage was electronics that control the drive as if it were an incremental drive. You take the plotter tape that was generated on an actual computer and mount it on the drive, press the magic button and the machine starts spitting out plotter instructions to the plotter and it starts drawing out whatever you put on the tape. This is like an IBM 757 basically... intended as an offline peripheral to drive a plotter without tying up your expensive computer in the process.
I could be mistaken, but I *think* that this is not actually a computer per-se... it's a data storage/streaming unit for a photo-plotter used for making PCBs, as mentioned by other commenters. The computer (or hardwired electronics) that interpreted the control codes for moving the photo-plotter head would have been in another chassis.
The first card you showed us, with the 8 large transistors mounted on it is for driving something. Maybe two stepper motors with four coils each? It has 8 channels of drive output, feeding the barrier strip screw terminals.
I worked for GSI in "84 and '85. Don't remember this specific model. As an FSE, I primarily worked on photoplotters, but I remember a few large pen plotters that were used by the defense industry. I worked on a system at GE that would pen plot a wing model at full scale. The curve plot was a know gerber strength. For some reason, I thought these systems might of had a HP-1000. I used to program the boot strap from tape on a 16 bit panel... In assembler! I met Joe once as he walked through the plant in Vernon CT. He became famous in WWII for the algorithm to draw on film with light. P.S. I doubt there were any LEDs on the panels. Just small lights. GSI were heavy integrators of DEC/PDP computers.
The Gerber file format is used for fabricating printed circuit boards. These are files that a printed circuit board CAD program can generate and which would be submitted to the circuit board manufacturer for production. You may find this interesting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_format
I know one thing, UsagI Electric would love to get his hands on this machine. ! 😍 if you have access to a 220 V line in a work Area at the museum somewhere, I would love to see a full explore, diagnostics, and repair vid .😀👍
When you opened up the back of the tape unit, I couldn't help comparing it to the IBM 729 tape drives. Those have larger motors and are definitely massive. The Gerber seems like it is newer than the IBM tape drive. The IBM drive fills the entire tape enclosure and looks to be larger than the Gerber. It is possible that one of the reasons the Gerber is smaller is that the Gerber doesn't use vacuum columns to control the tape transport. An interesting piece of equipment.
I am a simple man, I see reel to reel tape drive, I like. Also, Gerber format 🤔that standard you use in cad that's been around since the 80s 🤔a Gerber scientific computer used for some kind of plotting or CAD 🤔🤔🤔HMMMM - I don't think this is a computer as such, more of a data head end or 'Spooler' for Gerber code to drive a plotter or some form of CAD machine, which would explain the beefy power supply and the emergency stop button.
I agree with your other commentors, it's very likely a plotter driver for producing PCB artwork. However, what makes me curious that is that you would have absolutely no need for this for a "work from home" job. You would need at least the plotter as well as that rack, a full on dark room, not to mention full photo developing kit, not the kind of thing you would miss in a house clearance. So I suspect the government thing is just a family myth that made it's way into a "true story", and it was just bought at auction or similar by mad uncle Wilbour who was going to convert it into an automatic chicken feeder or something.
I believe this was rescued from the bin at some point, that's why it ended up in someone's home. No other (reasonable) explanation as this large beast alone would not be useful, you need the actual photoplotter that maybe needs to be in a dark room (or at least under yellow light) etc.
I had a Kennedy tape drive once. If its like mine its going to be loud because it had a vaccum in it. The vaccum was uses to keep a certain tension on the tape it was a real interesting mechanism. The tape path included a small chamber where the tape got sucked up into it and depending on how much vaccum was behind the tape it would affect capacitance of plate. That capacitance was used as feedback in an analog circuit that kept the tension on the tape so it stayed close to the same position in the chamber. This allowed the reels to operate at high speeds!
As Retrotechrestoration said below, this isn't a full machine. The Motorola IC's seem to have a date code on the chips from 77 and 78. Shame that if you could power it up that it wouldn't tell you much.
Gerber photo plotters were widely used to produce printed circuit artwork typically the plotting information would be produced by a mainframe or other computer and dumped to a nine track tape and then the 9 track tape would drive the plotter essentially offline independent of the main computer the Photo-plotter drew on unexposed film with light and operate in a dark room these were very common a few decades ago. The Gerber photo plotter format is still used today to describe circuit board artwork even though they're plotted with laser plotters or by other means now interesting piece
I've worked on Kennedy 9100 drives. I can see the family resemblance to this one. That hidden panel is for service tech working on the tape drive. it wouldn't be used under normal circumstances. The 9100 had a flaw that if you were in fast forward mode and hit end-of-tape, there's a 50% chance of blowing the servos, making you have to replace a number of big transistors to get it functional again.
it could be part of their system for running plotters. they would have been very limited production(only for a handful of companies). someone said on comments on some video they worked with gerber equipment back in the day, which were used for pcb design, they had a set of shapes and you used those. the plotter would expose film 1 shape at a time(from some wheel or something I presume) on the film at a specific location (there was no memory to rasterize, so you had to use a library of those shapes, like it would've been 1st gen CAD for pcb's) maybe that viewer is still around, i forgot which channels video it was on but it was about vintage pcb's I think, i think some electronics related channel and it was recently. maybe technology connections?
I found the copy of "Gerber Format Guide" that GSC sent me about 25 years ago (p/n 414-100-002 dated 1994). Is it already available electronicly? A quick scan of the "6X00" entries, show it was very limited in the formats it could accept, and the subset of G codes it could process and these were set at the factory at time of order maximum record size on the tapes appears to be 1024 bytes
Gerber invented the first computer digital plotting machines you may have heard the term Gerber file thrown around when talking about circuitry prints. I know people who manufactured them and worked there in Tolland ct
That has to be an early plotter control system of some sort, maybe for PCB layout or possibly blueprint drafting? If the owner was DoD, maybe the latter is more likely.
Gerber CNC controle unit. Would conect to a router a mill machine a cuttter Basickly whatever XY style cnc controle device you needed.. alltho with the size / power consumption i'd guess a larger machine not a small plotter.. not that it couldnt colntrole one. just overkill even for the tgime. Now what machine would of been conected to. Some here sugest PCB manufacture. but gerber was used and still is in a few places for a lot of cnc systems. not just pcb's so this coould of been making pannels big charts . heck regardless of the front controles it could of been part of a multiaxes setup and making car engines or prototype rockets for all we know... Makes me wonder how much of a computer is in this thing since it has a tape drive or is the tape just a feed driver. Make the file on a big computer convert it to the raw gerber file play the file back to controle the machines movements.
It looks to me like it drives a plotter, possibly a photoplotter for producing master artwork for PCBs and the like - the mirror option is to flip the image to account for double sided processing. I think that the plotter itself is just the transport and media handling and this unit does all the smarts to plot. The image is produced on a mainframe somewhere and passed to the plotter on tape.
Yup, this isn't a full computer. The cards in the lower card cage have very minimal component counts. Likely just for power regulation and interfacing with the plotter. I didn't see any type of ram, rom, cpu or bit slice logic.
@@RetroTechRestoration I am not surprised - I suspect you may be missing a rack. It is also possible that the contents of the tape have been processed down to simple vector moves, pen up and down and aperture selects that can be pulled straight off tape and pretty much fed to the motion control systems
We will never see or hear of it again. We keep seeing these "slideshow" tour videos, but no work done. Makes me wish Usagi Electric would get this stuff instead.
possibly the controller to an very old PCB imaging systerm? from when you used a light shining though apertutrs in a disk to image film (using the gerber file format that they created), though that tape being labeled "drill" is suspisious - could it run a early cnc drilling machine instead?
yes it could be a cnc controller too, good catch! information about those systems would be interesting to see. even just stuff like did they run the same tape containing the pcb for both machines, the drill and the exposer?
@@lasskinn474 I am assuming they would use the same drill file for drilling, and to put the pads oon each layer so they would line up. then use seperate file for the traces on each layer. you would use "mirror" to flip the image on the "bottom side" faces, so the film emulsion is always next to the copper to avoid blurry images. The company has changed hands many times over the years, not sure who currently owns them (Ucamco ?)
If 15-20 years is vintage in computing, Maybe this is Ancient Geek! Being a bespoke unit it seems like it either did some really cool top secret stuff for a top official who needs access to data 24/7, or relatively boring obscure engineering design stuff. Love a good plotter! Will be looking forward to future videos where we’ll learn more.
I don't believe it's a prototype. Masking tape notes were probably put there be a service tech. I used to work with Sperry minicomputers back in the 80s and the service techs, from Honeywell of all companies, were placing masking tape notes all over the insides of those.
Interesting…that would make sense and I suppose for troubleshooting it would be easier to see what the buttons were on that side of the metal plate rather than having to keep referring to the front panel.
When i visited the museum i said "i remember you from an 8bitGuy episode!" He looked at me funny and said "I don't think so...?" It was Usagi where I saw him 🤦
It's part of an early cad/cam system that helped engineers design PCB layout. The Gerber file specifies all aspects of a printed circuit board, including the conductor tracks, component location, solder mask, silkscreen for device legends, and drill data. Functionally, it's the same process in use today for pcb's. The 9-track tape was industry standard storage 40 years ago and used a simple 8-bit data field plus parity bit. The stuff you have is just the plotter driver section and not an actual computer. But it is a nice bit of history.
It was absolutely for PCB design. The tapes have labels like drill tapes, component art, solder art and +5v art.
That's the Gerber company that the Gerber (PCB) file format comes from.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gerber
You can make or buy a small transformer that upconverts 120 to 240v to do a power on with a standard outlet as long as it doesn’t draw more than about 2kW.
This is a plotter driver, not necessarily for PCBs. When I was a young boy, my first job was with a ship building company as a computer operator. We had a large format Gerber flatbed plotter. It used Mylar instead of paper on a vacuum hold down bed and ink pens. The engineers would design the ship structures on an IBM 370 mainframe computer and output the plot files to mag tape. I would then have to load the tape on the plotter to plot out the file. It was a pain in the ass and took forever. You almost never could operate the plotter at full speed because, depending upon the complexity of the plot, the pens would clog or run out of ink. Sometimes you would catch it, interrupt the plot and change the pen. Most of the time it would go too far, and you would have to start over. The engineers waiting for the plots were not too pleased, and I was the one to get yelled at. I guess, for the time, it was pretty high-tech.
That tape drive is a Kennedy that has been rebadged by Gerber. Looks like a 9200 or a 9000 (less the formatter). It's just a stock 9-track drive, nothing exciting. The panel that is covered is a maintenance panel that you do not use under normal operation. Tape the panel over to keep operators from fiddling with it! I think that these units didn't actually have a computer in them, in the sense of a von neumann machine. What's is in that card cage was electronics that control the drive as if it were an incremental drive. You take the plotter tape that was generated on an actual computer and mount it on the drive, press the magic button and the machine starts spitting out plotter instructions to the plotter and it starts drawing out whatever you put on the tape. This is like an IBM 757 basically... intended as an offline peripheral to drive a plotter without tying up your expensive computer in the process.
Speaking as someone who gets very excited by all 9 track drives, I don't see how you can say "nothing exciting" about a 9 track drive. ;)
Send it over to Usagi - he'll have it running in a month! 😋
I work for an automotive company, we had a room filled with Gerber Plotters, they ran 24/7
You know every time you mention Gerber I can't help thinking of the baby food company ;)
That is what was called a “mini-computer”.
Because it wasn’t the size of a house.
I could be mistaken, but I *think* that this is not actually a computer per-se... it's a data storage/streaming unit for a photo-plotter used for making PCBs, as mentioned by other commenters. The computer (or hardwired electronics) that interpreted the control codes for moving the photo-plotter head would have been in another chassis.
The first card you showed us, with the 8 large transistors mounted on it is for driving something. Maybe two stepper motors with four coils each? It has 8 channels of drive output, feeding the barrier strip screw terminals.
This machine probably ran a photoplotter for plotting Gerber apertures onto film. For PCB production.
Maybe a pen plotter. They had ones that were extremely large.
I worked for GSI in "84 and '85. Don't remember this specific model. As an FSE, I primarily worked on photoplotters, but I remember a few large pen plotters that were used by the defense industry. I worked on a system at GE that would pen plot a wing model at full scale. The curve plot was a know gerber strength. For some reason, I thought these systems might of had a HP-1000. I used to program the boot strap from tape on a 16 bit panel... In assembler! I met Joe once as he walked through the plant in Vernon CT. He became famous in WWII for the algorithm to draw on film with light. P.S. I doubt there were any LEDs on the panels. Just small lights. GSI were heavy integrators of DEC/PDP computers.
Impressive 😊
The Gerber file format is used for fabricating printed circuit boards. These are files that a printed circuit board CAD program can generate and which would be submitted to the circuit board manufacturer for production. You may find this interesting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_format
What a score!
I know one thing, UsagI Electric would love to get his hands on this machine. ! 😍
if you have access to a 220 V line in a work Area at the museum somewhere,
I would love to see a full explore, diagnostics, and repair vid .😀👍
When you opened up the back of the tape unit, I couldn't help comparing it to the IBM 729 tape drives. Those have larger motors and are definitely massive. The Gerber seems like it is newer than the IBM tape drive. The IBM drive fills the entire tape enclosure and looks to be larger than the Gerber. It is possible that one of the reasons the Gerber is smaller is that the Gerber doesn't use vacuum columns to control the tape transport. An interesting piece of equipment.
wow
This looks like a CNC controller for PCB manufacturing machine (photo-plotter).
I am a simple man, I see reel to reel tape drive, I like.
Also, Gerber format 🤔that standard you use in cad that's been around since the 80s 🤔a Gerber scientific computer used for some kind of plotting or CAD 🤔🤔🤔HMMMM - I don't think this is a computer as such, more of a data head end or 'Spooler' for Gerber code to drive a plotter or some form of CAD machine, which would explain the beefy power supply and the emergency stop button.
I want an EMERGENCY STOP button like that for all my computers, new and old. ;)
specially useful for that "AI"
I agree with your other commentors, it's very likely a plotter driver for producing PCB artwork. However, what makes me curious that is that you would have absolutely no need for this for a "work from home" job.
You would need at least the plotter as well as that rack, a full on dark room, not to mention full photo developing kit, not the kind of thing you would miss in a house clearance. So I suspect the government thing is just a family myth that made it's way into a "true story", and it was just bought at auction or similar by mad uncle Wilbour who was going to convert it into an automatic chicken feeder or something.
I believe this was rescued from the bin at some point, that's why it ended up in someone's home. No other (reasonable) explanation as this large beast alone would not be useful, you need the actual photoplotter that maybe needs to be in a dark room (or at least under yellow light) etc.
I had a Kennedy tape drive once. If its like mine its going to be loud because it had a vaccum in it. The vaccum was uses to keep a certain tension on the tape it was a real interesting mechanism. The tape path included a small chamber where the tape got sucked up into it and depending on how much vaccum was behind the tape it would affect capacitance of plate. That capacitance was used as feedback in an analog circuit that kept the tension on the tape so it stayed close to the same position in the chamber. This allowed the reels to operate at high speeds!
I've worked on a 9100 as well. But this 9000 seems to have "arms" for that function rather than a vacuum column.
As Retrotechrestoration said below, this isn't a full machine. The Motorola IC's seem to have a date code on the chips from 77 and 78. Shame that if you could power it up that it wouldn't tell you much.
Gerber photo plotters were widely used to produce printed circuit artwork typically the plotting information would be produced by a mainframe or other computer and dumped to a nine track tape and then the 9 track tape would drive the plotter essentially offline independent of the main computer the Photo-plotter drew on unexposed film with light and operate in a dark room these were very common a few decades ago. The Gerber photo plotter format is still used today to describe circuit board artwork even though they're plotted with laser plotters or by other means now interesting piece
I've worked on Kennedy 9100 drives. I can see the family resemblance to this one. That hidden panel is for service tech working on the tape drive. it wouldn't be used under normal circumstances. The 9100 had a flaw that if you were in fast forward mode and hit end-of-tape, there's a 50% chance of blowing the servos, making you have to replace a number of big transistors to get it functional again.
Quite literally, a print spooler.
it could be part of their system for running plotters. they would have been very limited production(only for a handful of companies).
someone said on comments on some video they worked with gerber equipment back in the day, which were used for pcb design, they had a set of shapes and you used those. the plotter would expose film 1 shape at a time(from some wheel or something I presume) on the film at a specific location (there was no memory to rasterize, so you had to use a library of those shapes, like it would've been 1st gen CAD for pcb's)
maybe that viewer is still around, i forgot which channels video it was on but it was about vintage pcb's I think, i think some electronics related channel and it was recently. maybe technology connections?
I was hoping it'd be an industrial press for the baby food company but this computer is still cool too... I guess.
I think it's cool all these people starting computing museums. Do you ever do stuff with the national computing museum?
I found the copy of "Gerber Format Guide" that GSC sent me about 25 years ago (p/n 414-100-002 dated 1994). Is it already available electronicly?
A quick scan of the "6X00" entries, show it was very limited in the formats it could accept, and the subset of G codes it could process
and these were set at the factory at time of order
maximum record size on the tapes appears to be 1024 bytes
If this thing gets running it will be super cool!
Gerber invented the first computer digital plotting machines you may have heard the term Gerber file thrown around when talking about circuitry prints. I know people who manufactured them and worked there in Tolland ct
That has to be an early plotter control system of some sort, maybe for PCB layout or possibly blueprint drafting? If the owner was DoD, maybe the latter is more likely.
Gerber CNC controle unit.
Would conect to a router a mill machine a cuttter Basickly whatever XY style cnc controle device you needed.. alltho with the size / power consumption i'd guess a larger machine not a small plotter.. not that it couldnt colntrole one. just overkill even for the tgime.
Now what machine would of been conected to. Some here sugest PCB manufacture. but gerber was used and still is in a few places for a lot of cnc systems.
not just pcb's so this coould of been making pannels big charts . heck regardless of the front controles it could of been part of a multiaxes setup and making car engines or prototype rockets for all we know...
Makes me wonder how much of a computer is in this thing since it has a tape drive or is the tape just a feed driver. Make the file on a big computer convert it to the raw gerber file play the file back to controle the machines movements.
It looks to me like it drives a plotter, possibly a photoplotter for producing master artwork for PCBs and the like - the mirror option is to flip the image to account for double sided processing. I think that the plotter itself is just the transport and media handling and this unit does all the smarts to plot. The image is produced on a mainframe somewhere and passed to the plotter on tape.
Yup, this isn't a full computer. The cards in the lower card cage have very minimal component counts. Likely just for power regulation and interfacing with the plotter. I didn't see any type of ram, rom, cpu or bit slice logic.
@@RetroTechRestoration I am not surprised - I suspect you may be missing a rack. It is also possible that the contents of the tape have been processed down to simple vector moves, pen up and down and aperture selects that can be pulled straight off tape and pretty much fed to the motion control systems
Minuteman III work from home launch console.
The mirroring would probably be for plotting the back sides of PCBs. Gerber Scientific did PCB plotting.
Great point! This also would explain some of the labels on the tapes we received with the unit that seem to refer to PCB components
Really interesting…I’ll be curious as to how far you’re able to proceed with this one !! Good luck !
We will never see or hear of it again. We keep seeing these "slideshow" tour videos, but no work done. Makes me wish Usagi Electric would get this stuff instead.
@@rivards1Did yeo see the second part
A shame about the power up... in the UK you'd have no problems.
possibly the controller to an very old PCB imaging systerm? from when you used a light shining though apertutrs in a disk to image film (using the gerber file format that they created), though that tape being labeled "drill" is suspisious - could it run a early cnc drilling machine instead?
yes it could be a cnc controller too, good catch! information about those systems would be interesting to see. even just stuff like did they run the same tape containing the pcb for both machines, the drill and the exposer?
@@lasskinn474 I am assuming they would use the same drill file for drilling, and to put the pads oon each layer so they would line up. then use seperate file for the traces on each layer. you would use "mirror" to flip the image on the "bottom side" faces, so the film emulsion is always next to the copper to avoid blurry images.
The company has changed hands many times over the years, not sure who currently owns them (Ucamco ?)
If 15-20 years is vintage in computing, Maybe this is Ancient Geek!
Being a bespoke unit it seems like it either did some really cool top secret stuff for a top official who needs access to data 24/7, or relatively boring obscure engineering design stuff.
Love a good plotter! Will be looking forward to future videos where we’ll learn more.
Wow. You folks find the most interesting hardware. I'd bet David Lovitt (Usagi Electric) would love to look this over.
I don't believe it's a prototype. Masking tape notes were probably put there be a service tech. I used to work with Sperry minicomputers back in the 80s and the service techs, from Honeywell of all companies, were placing masking tape notes all over the insides of those.
Interesting…that would make sense and I suppose for troubleshooting it would be easier to see what the buttons were on that side of the metal plate rather than having to keep referring to the front panel.
David od Usagi Electric will go full ecstatacy with this video 🤣
When i visited the museum i said "i remember you from an 8bitGuy episode!" He looked at me funny and said "I don't think so...?" It was Usagi where I saw him 🤦
Usagi electric probably could help you