Mystery Object - ancient electronics?

Some kind of backplane used for connecting circuit cards, which fit onto the pins vertically? You'd only populate the pins you used for each card, and join them together on the backplane.

Although the spacing between rows or columns looks a bit tight for that, and the handle orientation is odd (this would go at the back of a card rack, whereas cards with handles would typically go with handles facing the front).

Theo

Might it be encoding a program for something? Although that would not explain pins that are present but not connected to anything, unless the presence of a pin encodes something additional to the interconnections.

nib

Google Lens thinks it's a Sadhu Board (or nail board) used for meditation and originating from ancient Indian traditions. Apparently, you stand barefoot on the nails!

But that doesn't sound very likely in view of the fact that there are sturdy wires soldered to the other ends of the pins.

It's a patch board. The pins contain a diode (probably Germanium) and you insert a pin where you want a '1' and leave it out for a '0'.

That's what I would have said ... except for the seeming direction of insertion.

J^n

Impossible to guess with so little information. Are the pins spring loaded? Are they electrically connected? Can they be roved? If the answer to both is yes Id say a crude from of ROM...

Searching for similar images the ones that match best are arrays for making cartridges up

The most likely objects that match are ammunition storage, and those are in fact small bore cartridges...

Can the pins be removed and the board re-configured? If so I'd suggest it was an early bootstrap ROM, or possibly part of a cypher system. Have you any other parts from the same system?

"""Internally (I gingerly partly opened it up a couple of years ago) there are sturdy wires soldered between _some_ of the pins """ ?

Maybe try over in alt.folklore.computers? Some traffic, and this exactly the thing the folk there would know.

Thomas Prufer

I would say that it is a patch panel for an analogue computer. The links would join various op-amp inputs/outputs to other components. I suspect that this is either a test program or a program used by an instructor that cannot be changed by students. The normal panel would have pluggable wire links and a card chart showing components to be used. The panel slides into hinged guides which are then clamped by a lever to make all the connections. I used to carry one pre-programmed to generate a nice sine wave for servicing. Examples would be Solartron Hybrid Computer Series 7:-

Something to hold a first-stage boot loader?

Andy Burns snipped-for-privacy@andyburns.uk wrote

We really need to see the wiring inside

The grid is 14 rows x 24 columns, so 336 bits or 42 bytes. What bootloader can you do in 42 bytes?

I suppose some kind of copy loop - read from X, write to Y, X++, Y++, could fit.

But there are only 9 distinct column configurations, so if each column was a word then there would only be 9 instructions used and many of them are repeated in succession. This seems a bit unlikely if it was machine code.

There are also 8 distinct row configurations, so same thing applies.

Theo

I seem to recall that punching a bootloader into the Data General Nova needed about a dozen bytes to start up either a paper tape reader or hard disc. The first section of the tape/disc contained a better bootloader, with parity checking over blocks, followed by the operating system.

The actual Nova had the usual minicomputer row of toggle switches:

Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote

The PDP8 needed less than that

But there is too much repetition next to each other for that

Yes, I was thinking along the lines of a PDP-8 where you'd get 28 12bit words, obviously it doesn't look at all DEC-like, but y'know ...

And that is surely the right answer.