Well, well, well. It is time to look in again on the doings of DummyDave, the Auction man who emulates the statue of Justice, where she is blindfolded and holding the scales. Yes, The Flying Finger once again pressed the keyboard, and online bidding began. And as usual, DD the terror of the Auction, bought a lot of stuff. Drool on recyclers. Can your psyche stand the enumeration of the joyful buys brought home by the pickup and trailer loads by a man so fearless that he bids on uninspected lots, when he had two weeks to drive a mere 15 miles and see exactly what he might buy?
One pallet had about 100 computer keyboards with the old style round plug,.
, , see, I don't even know what they are called ...serial ports? About a hundred pounds of PC power supplies with wires, so that is OK. A couple boxes of DVD and CD units from PC's. I can see you guys who save your drools for telecom boards are loosing interest, so look at this. Got a half dozen of these babies, and tried researching them on ebay without bothering to really get name or number, so didn't find anything...Went ahead and opened the unit to see what was inside, and then entered manufacturer and numbers in search. Yep, my curiosity destroyed a unit that probably would sell in the 20 to 50 dollar range.
Another lot had a dozen old heavy Dell and Compaq towers and Servers, so I got a little good stuff for my Boardsort collection. About the only other items with boards were the 12 stand alone upright copiers/printers most of which had at least 3 boards peripheral or better, as well as a low grade. Oh, did I mention there were about 200 external stand alone computer speakers, desktop size.... Didn't think that would interest you. Now while you are learning from my mistake and seeing that I destroyed a 30 dollar item to get the two 30 cent boards, puzzle over what I can do with 300 industrial dust filter bags, 8 inch diameter by 40 inches long....use them for 4th of July Stockings, filled with baked beans and bbq and fireworks?

Two boards, one incoming, one outgoing signal I think. Nothing on backs.

Forgot to mention I did get several pounds of the items on the updated buy list , such as networking units, etc, so almost got enough for a decent load to deliver in person.

Wow, chipcom!
That’s an old one!

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Maybe, but it is so new to me!

Chipcom, previously ChipCOM was a bleeding edge networking company. Their story is much like Apple up to the latter’s purchase of neXt. They had some of the brightest engineers in computing on staff. They came up with amazing stuff. Made partnerships. And then a ‘day before release’ walked away. Management was very skittish on financing anything outside of R&D.
Like apple had a chance to destroy IBM and Wintell; Chipcom had a chance to take total control in networking and blew it. What you have is one of the few products they actually released. They were doing optical communications in the 80s when everyone else was using com-talk, Apple talk, and dialup! By the time they actually shipped that card it was too late. They were bought out.
I believe it was 3Com that took them over. They’re one of the companies in the Fire in the Valley series of books.
Fully working and mint that unit runs in the $50-$60 range. But DOA it may still move to a Collector for up to $20-$30 so I’d put it back together and try to ebay it under vintage computers as DOA. It won’t be a quick sell but it will sell eventually.
There’s a market. Apple invented the PC for the rest of us. ChipCOM invented 0-conf network routing. And the two had dealings that make their products of interest to collectors not just of the vintage but also of Apple and IBM parts.

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Thanks. I do have a few more still intact and unbroken seal...no idea how to "test", but would be happy to recoup a hundredfold profit. I didn't really want to be a full time purveyor of vintage parts...I just wanted to get a few more boards for my next load.
Just like a few months back, I had a bit of brass, and intending to sell it for that days spending money, I stopped by the thrift store to see if any low cost brass items were available...a few cents profit per pound since I was making the sell trip anyway. The usual ebay sellers were not there at opening that day, so I managed to be among the first to arrive in the metals and housewares section, and sure enough, there were 9 "silverplated brass" goblets priced 35 cents each. I grabbed them, intending to make almost three dollars profit when I sold them for recycling later that day. Now I assume that everybody else had assumed they were silverplated over brass, or more likely these days, Nickel silver over steel from China. When I did look at the stamp on the bottom, turns out they were 1940's Sterling by a reputable manufacturer, currently selling for up to $225 each on ebay. Boy, was I mad when I realized I was stuck with them, and would not be getting my six dollars for brass that day.

Honestly, you can’t. Not without hundreds of dollars of equipment or building your own clones.
You could build a pin-out to match the contacts and— yep. Not easily. But as I said as small as the are; no reason not to shoot some photos, ebay it, and stick them on a shelf out of the way. They do sell for those willing to wait.

Lol.
I grew up in parallel with the PC industry. So I have a personal attachment to things those older and younger don’t think twice on.
I remember, fondly in retrospect, email taking 6 hours to send 250 words. Or two days for a single image!
It took me days to get a new off the shelf generic 8-bit CPM compatible to even boot. I was always fascinated not by what was, but what could be.
I not only used dial-in BBSs, I Ran one. CompuServe and AOL users who liked video games will remember it, JamPro. At it’s peak I had more users than AOL and Prodigy did at the same period; much to my parent’s dismay. We eventually got a second phone line since the modem was running 24-7 despite having 30-call capacity.
But now as I age and consider myself collector... it’s the failures that fascinate me most.
Boardsort actually doesn’t get all that much from me. Nothing in the last year.
But that’s because 9 times in 10 I can find a way to make it work.
It’s rarely like new, and often not pretty!
But those in my camp know right away what I mean.
Getting an 8-bit or 6-bit kit to power up today is cause for celebration.
Making it boot is a Miracle! I was lucky enough to work in multiple “aftermarket” companies in the 90s. In the Midwest. Where so many computer companies formed and died: I saw stuff show up for sale/resale that never hit public markets. Including my Atari PAM and a prototype Nintendo Playsatation. Both never got entered into the company inventory and both I still have today.
My memory says I paid around $20 each. My first retail used tech/computer shop hired me because the manager knew me from the game and demo scene, and new I was teaching myself Japanese(still barely passable) and had a source for import information. He convinced the owner that my knowledge would blow out every game in inventory in a week. At a reasonable price. And they’d never overpay again. It worked. And being there exposed me things I’d never have seen otherwise. Comdex, CES, the Apple conventions.
My oh shite oops purchases of damaged crap lead me to tinker even more since the sole staff technician hated my guts (and every other living being on earth), and wouldn’t touch anything I bought... broken. I used CPM, DOS, and Unix at home. We had windows, every version from 2.0. But I preferred dos and Unix. I quickly learned Mac OS, GEM, SPS, SOS, Linux, and many others. Not by choice but because I overpaid for a laptop with one working memory slot. Or a Leading Edge with a bad co-proc socket. I had to flip this stuff to earn my commission AND keep from being fired.
BUT, the volume of junk that came through was amazing. Prototypes and demos. Software on cassettes and VHS tapes.
I left as my first resale job as the company folded. The Tech went to Comdex in Vegas with 75% of the inventory and never came back. Six weeks later the DOJ and BSA had people wondering around our three locations looking at our software AND the books. The owner stopped paying people so we all paid ourselves in merchandise as we quit one by one and walked out the door. He was arrested for selling fake Office and Windows discs.
I should also mention we were a boutique builder. Not that we went anywhere.
But the bug stuck. The wow factor. The WTF is it stories. I joined on with another company in the same field some time later... but by then it just wasn’t the same. The Mystique was gone.

Well. Pointless about me done with!
If you find something and it’s not coming up on google or Bing... ASK.
I’ve even been stumped over the years but I believe SOMEONE has figured out EVERY mystery item posted here since I joined

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My first experience with "computers" was when comet Ketohec was supposedly passing by, and Radio Shack was selling a build your own kit that showed where the comet could be found in the night skies. My brother bought one, and spent hours trying to type in the lines of "plain English code" such as "if, not, go to line ten" "go to line 20" etc. Don't recall ever seeing the thing work or the comet.
I enjoyed your rehashing the growing up with the computer technology age. Although all the systems and units you mentioned sounded like Greek heroes off fighting their wars, it did have its own fascinations in the hearing.
Now that my ebay limits have raised, I suppose I could go ahead and list several
"sleeper items" for some searching geek to discover some day, even if they don't sell quickly.

In the early 80s nobody at Apple management cared about networking. So they gave a few engineers free reign and a budget and sad make it happen.
ChipCOM was just coming off the failed Self Terminating Gateway Protocol, STGP, and came up the plan to bump out something it already had, leading to this. But their plan was to use it for a fire-sale buyout offer. IBM was one of the pitches who opted to ignore them and continue with their Token Ring disaster.
So they pitched Apple. The two companies came up with a software stack that could link SAN with optical LAN and WAN as proof to see the two companies could work together, and eventually merge. But by the late 80s Apple management was a revolving door and the merger fell apart. ChipCOM took their toys and went home. Apple kept the software and the ‘stack’ eventually mutated into bonjour.
There’s much more to the story of all three, the two companies and the eventual bonjour product. Including the Rendezvous lawsuit. And many hard working Coders in between. But the card in your hand helped spark the internet revolution; and the vast majority don’t even know.

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