Serial 8-Bit ISA Card,are they still used? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: jorgeh
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 04:35:34 pm
content: Hi,one question Im saving a bunch of ISA Cards, they dont look like regular ones. so I asume they are for PLC .are they still used today?.Im asking because I see some are listed on eBay, but honestly idk if they are still used. some have parts missing, my goal is to better identify them for either recycle or re-use.tnx in advancehere are some pics of the different boards.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 04:45:29 pm
content: Wow, that is quite a bunch of cards you have.But I think you also have multi io cards in the mix, where there might be floppy disk, ide or scsi controllers. At least parallel printer ports.Don't think there is still a lot of demand for them. Maybe in industrial systems that still use ISA?The third card looks like a multi i/o card with all the headers on it.

author: edpalmer42
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 06:38:08 pm
content: The 13th and 18th cards - long cards with two widely seperated edge connectors - are VESA local bus cards. That was an early competitor to the PCI bus.As pcprogrammer said, these days industrial systems are the biggest users of ISA cards. They'd rather spend a few hundred dollars on a replacement board than tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of downtime on a new system.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 06:53:36 pm
content: Even with industrial use there are very few PCs that old still in use. I remember looking for a new computer with still an ISA bus slow in around 1998 and this was just possible by than.So the cards are more something for collectors / historic computer people - nothing to be really used.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 07:07:36 pm
content: Quote from: Kleinstein on July 13, 2022, 06:53:36 pmLike for instance for "Adrians Digital Basement"https://www.youtube.com/c/adriansdigitalbasement

author: edpalmer42
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 07:41:40 pm
content: Looking closer at those VESA local-bus cards, I don't think either of them is a serial IO board.The Cirrus Logic chip on the first one is a graphics chip.The second one is labelled as Targa 486DX-40. It's either a graphics board or possibly, a single board industrial computer.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 08:15:27 pm
content: Some are MIDI/joystick+Parallel port I/O interface cards, like this onehttps://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hw_controller_serial_parallel_hmc_winbond.htmlEdit: you could still sell some of them to Retro community people.

author: edpalmer42
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 08:30:01 pm
content: I just went to ebay and searched for sold boards with this search list <isa (board,card)> .There were 29 boards that sold for US$100 or over in the Business Section. The highest price was $1200.In the Computer Section, there were over 700 cards sold. The highest price was over US$1300. Multi I/O boards were in the $20 - $50 range.Apparently there is a market for old ISA cards.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2022, 08:45:00 pm
content: That's rave from the grave. I think I may have a few ISA cards in a box somewhere.The first looks like a dual serial card, and the second looks like a serial parallel card, but that big heatsink is odd.The third may be a PCI SCSI card.In the late 80s all sorts of functions now integrated into motherboards were delivered by cards. A typical PC might have a VGA card and a four function controller card - floppy, hard drive, serial and parallel. Then there were SCSI cards, some of which included a floppy disk controller. ESDI was a hard drive bus which had its own cards. There were also LAN cards and CD ROM controller cards. There were modem cards. There were higher resolution graphics cards. There were even RAM extension cards. There were attempts to supercede ISA by other standards such as MCA and EISA, and there were a couple of graphics bus standards.There were also all sorts of data acquisition cards, relay cards, etc using ISA, used in industrial PCs. Some of them are still made today.https://advanbuy.com/category-product/data-acquisition-and-io/isa-bus-industrial-communication-cards/There seems to be a growing interest in retro computing. I'm sure there are sites on the WWW where they revel in this stuff so you'd have a better idea of what they are, and they may be of value to someone. Before you sell something on ebay, it's better to have a clear idea of what you are selling.

author: jorgeh
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2022, 08:03:46 am
content: Hi,yes sorry i got some pics mixed up and en up posting them. all ISA boards 8 or 16 bit came from industrial pcs. just for fun I checked the price on some of them and it was pretty attractive. But I wasnt sure if there is a real use for them. I mean, if there are machinery that still have them in production.Next thing would be to learn how to check them. I remember in the old days we used laplink over rs-232 to transfer files from different points in the factory.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2022, 08:19:26 am
content: To check if they work you will need a device with an ISA bus, and software to control the cards. To check the other side (RS-232) you can use USB to serial devices, but getting one that does true RS-232 (between +/- 3V -- 15V) is probably also a bit tricky.Nowadays the USB to serial devices are mainly TTL (Mostly 5V or 3.3V)

author: CaptDon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2022, 12:53:49 pm
content: I know there is a market for old 486 motherboards that have usually 2 8bit ISA slots. Many industrial machines that have an old PC computer integrated in to them must remain 'as shipped'. GPIB cards and some of the dedicated TTL and analog I/O cards seem to be worth gold. Also those old motherboards had bios limits which makes many of the old 2gb and smaller IDE hard drives bringing prices above what they originally sold for. Due to some of the old systems relying on the 5mb and 10mb SyQuest removable hard disk packs the old Floppy/MFM or Floppy/RLL controller cards are worth a small fortune to the right people!! I can tell you as a fact that Harley Davidson in York, Flinchbaugh/Olin in Red Lion still have machines in use dating to WWII so it stands to reason some of these 'integrated PC' machines using old 386/486 technology will still be around for many years as will some of the stackable PC401 modular stuff. Have you priced any of that 401 stuff lately. We built medical machines costing 10's of thousands of dollars using those stackable modules. Some of those old boards seem to bring 'gold' prices but again, many are totally useless.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2022, 08:51:07 pm
content: You seem to be fixated on industrial PCs but i think you have more chances to sell to PC retro enthusuasts. Plenty of people restoring all sort of early PCs.

author: retiredfeline
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2022, 11:38:04 pm
content: Some of those cards are definitely usable in what were consumer PCs then. You have a handful of combo serial/parallel port cards as evidenced by the chips and connectors. You have some video cards mixed in there. Anyway others have identified them for you.I tossed out my collection when my last ISA bus mobo died. I know some retro builders could have used them, but connecting with buyers via ebay, gumtree, or whatever, then getting paid and shipping was more trouble than the little money they might netted, if any.

author: jorgeh
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2022, 07:30:36 am
content: Hiyeah I saw on ebay that there is a market for them. but the industrial ones grab my attention since some were sold for a couple of hundred euros.I do get a lot, well I find them to be a lot, of retro equipment from goverment surplus or somtimes even companies.There are some that honestly I cant properly identify.

author: retiredfeline
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2022, 08:20:16 am
content: I think the expensive ones are those that have a particular spec that cannot be found on other similar looking cards, and replacements must be exact. You'll have to check to see if you have one of those. Not unlike antique identification. And you'd have to test that your card is working. Anyway good luck and let us know how you go.

author: SK85
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 15, 2022, 05:02:05 am
content: I would need the card with the number 0979.01.02a from Doli Elektronik.Would you sell it?Thanks SK

author: MrAl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 15, 2022, 05:51:20 pm
content: This is kinda funny the other day i found my old ISA modem i used long, long, long ago back in the cave man days. It's for a phone line.I had etched an ISA board for experimentation with port decoding i probably still have it around somewhere. It was going to be for interfacing some test equipment.Now i have nothing that can take an ISA card and i really dont have a need to do that anymore. ISA cards will take a lot more power than anything else because they used chips that are older that consumed more power. They will also be MUCH MUCH slower than current technology.Along the same lines, i built an 8 digit LED frequency counter using all TTL chips and i still have that. It's more of a relic now though because of the advancements in test equipment over the last 20 years.If you find a buyer that's great, and that may be the only challenge except maybe getting a card to work again if it is faulty.Even PCI is going out the door, replaced by PCIe, and even THAT is slowly working it's way out in favor of NVMe.The computer buss technology is always advancing demanding more and more speed. Some of todays standard interfaces can do 40 GB/s (that's 40 gigabytes per second) which was totally and completely unheard of and unimaginable when ISA was king.

author: coromonadalix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 15, 2022, 06:02:59 pm
content: loll funny post with tons of cards, and yes you may still need them is some cases ...I just trashed an old Compaq P3-800 desktop used in an old pcb oven, old serial isa 8 bit card in it loll kept it as a souvenir, same thing with old US Robotics 56k modem, and this one costed me lots $$$ in the days lollDual serial Winbond 550 ic's on it, not the usual 450if i recallCosted us an mere 15k yeah 15k $$$ to do an major system electronics upgrade, to finally be able to use it in windows 10 thru lan network ....

author: nightfire
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 16, 2022, 05:36:18 am
content: The both Vesa Local Bus cards are VGA Cards- recognizable by the 15 pin connector. The Targa label probably hints on the host system where that card was installed.