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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?

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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.

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    @Wilson Calera. Caldera was founded six years later.
    – Stephen Kitt
    May 5, 2019 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 5, 2019 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 5, 2019 at 13:31
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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 5, 2019 at 23:16
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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 6, 2019 at 13:53

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