This card is from a piece of lab equipment I used in a digital electronics lab at the University Illinois in '84 or '85. The class was cross listed in both the Computer Science department and the Electrical Engineering department... I don't remember the class number.
This card fit into a small card cage that held about ten of this cards. Lots of different types of cards were available: switches (shown above), LED's, NAND gates, NOR gates, FLIP FLOPs, even Counters. In the class, we designed circuits to do things like counting to ten, or playing tic tac toe. For my final project, I picked the four story elevator... but I often thought about going back and doing the candy machine project too.
Once the circuit was designed, and carefully drawn out on drafting paper, we picked out all the cards we needed and filled the card cage, wired up the gates and flip flops according to the circuit... and then... you got to play with your creation. It was totally awesome.
I dearly wish I had been around when they retired this equipment. If you have any idea where I could find one, please let me know. Anyone else remember using these? -K.
