Can anyone identify this unknown 1988 PC card from The Palantir Corporation?

Question

I'm trying to restore order to my ~~junk pile~~ office, and I ran across this card. I am usually pretty good at generally identifying old (PC?) stuff, but this one is outside my experience.

I think it is some sort of co-processor - the card is clearly labeled "X4 Copyright (C) 1988 The Palantir Corporation" and appears to sport a Motorola MC68020 CPU. There is also a 40 pin (if I counted right) unkeyed connector in the center of the card, and two large connectors near what looks like a large block of RAM (I might hazard a guess these might support a daughter-card with more memory?)

Can anyone tell me what this thing is?

score 58 · Accepted Answer · edited May 12 '19 at 12:14

58

This is a TrueScan board, which was used for OCR in PC AT systems. The board included a Motorola 68020 CPU, 2 or 4 MiB of RAM, and cost a cool $2,795 for the 2 MiB version (in 1988), $3,995 for the 4 MiB version.

You won’t find much by searching for Palantir, because by the time this was available for sale, the company had changed its name to Calera.

The FCC ID database confirms that 22YTRUESCAN was produced by Calera Recognition Systems.

edited May 12 '19 at 12:14

Cody Gray - on strike

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answered May 05 '19 at 13:12

Stephen Kitt

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"Calera"? Or Caldera? – Omar and Lorraine May 05 '19 at 13:15
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@Wilson Calera. Caldera was founded six years later. – Stephen Kitt May 05 '19 at 13:18
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Bingo! Thanks! It makes perfect sense too, because the company dumpster this got fished out of did indeed do OCR for customers back in the day... – Geo... May 05 '19 at 13:24
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Unbelievable. By an astounding bit of luck, I just found an envelope labeled "Calera Recognition Systems" containing 5, 3.5" floppy disks - that (now) look suspiciously related. :-) – Geo... May 05 '19 at 13:31
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It makes you wonder what else could be done with these cards... Imagine running System 5 or 6 on this (with the appropriate ROM of course)! – Stephen Kitt May 05 '19 at 19:05
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There were general-purpose boards like this too, such as the Definicon DSI 785: 12.5 MHz 68020, 68881 FPU and 68851 MMU ... – scruss May 05 '19 at 23:16
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That's more power than an Amiga on a single expansion board. – David Tonhofer May 06 '19 at 13:43
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@DavidTonhofer That board is about as big as the whole Amiga motherboard though. :P – pipe May 06 '19 at 13:49
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@David that thought occurred to me too, but it’s missing Paula, Agnus and Denise. – Stephen Kitt May 06 '19 at 13:49
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@scruss That's pretty interesting. "Definicon has implemented an interface between the 8088/80286 and the 68020 that allows the 68020 to run UNIX-quality development tools without requiring either a UNIX kernel or a UNIX file system." – pipe May 06 '19 at 13:53

Can anyone identify this unknown 1988 PC card from The Palantir Corporation?

1 Answers1