[robespierre]

There's chips from LSI on it which to me screams drive controller.

LSI Logic was founded in 1981, a decade before anybody was making Fibre Channel HBAs. Their main business during the 1980s was mask gate arrays, which is why so many of their chips are in graphics workstations like SGIs or Suns. They all carry "L1Axxxx" numbers.

The other company of note in standard-cell ASICs was VLSI Technology.