I refer to this system as a Pulsar 9000, but is actually really a loose interpretation of what a Pulsar 9000 might have been. It arrived as a collection of STD boards made by Pulsar, some STD subracks, some Pulsar enclosures, some TurboDOS manuals, some 8” floppy disks, and a few notes, brochures, price lists etc.
The work on the Pulsar 7500 helped to give some insights into how TurboDOS is used on a multiprocessor system, but this is a step-up in complexity and with less documentation. In particular, the specifics of how to install TurboDOS were missing.
The 7500 used Little Big Boards and SASI/Serial cards, and it arrived as a system. There was manual that confirmed the arrangement and how to boot it.
The cards had no labelling that indicated what they were, but matching the components with some brochures and price lists helped to identify them.
Amongst the cards were:
- 2x STD-6016 80186 CPU Cards – one with 256kB and the other with 1MB
- 10x STD-6080 Z80B CPU Cards
- 2x STD-6216 SASI Floppy RTC
The CPU cards were sold as masters or slaves. The type of card was probably just an EPROM change or jumper setting.
The STD-6080 cards are more powerful than the Little Big Boards in the Pulsar 7000. They have better inter-processor comms, including a network interface and through-the-backplane connectivity. They have no floppy disk interface.
Some of STD-6080 cards do not have the network interface installed.
The DIP switches possibly set the address of the card on the STD bus. Switch 7 appears to be the LSB. There are 6 cards that seem to follow a sequence of 0 to 5. There are another 4 cards that follow a sequence of 0 to 3. Perhaps two separate systems originally.
There is very little information available for these cards. There are some brochures but no manuals or schematics.
STD-6080 6MHz Z80B
The STD-6080 cards are more powerful than the Little Big Boards in the Pulsar 7000. They have better inter-processor comms, including a network interface and through-the-backplane connectivity. They have no floppy disk interface.
Some of STD-6080 cards do not have the network interface installed.
The DIP switches possibly set the address of the card on the STD bus. Switch 7 appears to be the LSB. There are 6 cards that seem to follow a sequence of 0 to 5. There are another 4 cards that follow a sequence of 0 to 3. Perhaps two separate systems originally.
There is very little information available for these cards. There are some brochures but no manuals or schematics. Some of the boards have the serial network driver – others don’t. I don’t intend to set up a serial network at present so it doesn’t matter much.
Based on the settings of the cards, the DIP switches operate as follows:
| Switch | Function | Setting |
| 8 | Master/Slave | Set to On |
| 7-3 | Slave ID | On=0, Sw7 is the LSB. 0000 is slave number 1. |
| 2 | May be a part of slave ID. Not sure! | |
| 1 | Don’t know. Maybe determines the network interface? | Set to On |
These seem to be similar for the 80186 boards as well.
STD-6016 8MHz 80186
There is a 256k board and a 1MB board. The 256k board is labelled “master only”. I tried it as a slave, and although the boot sequence seemed to complete ok, there was no output from the serial port.
Both can operate as masters.
STD-6216 Floppy/SASI/RTC
Not too much info on this one.
