🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jan28.140632.20240@mlb.semi.harris.com> jws@cica4.mlb.semi.harris.com (James W. Swonger) writes:
>
> An S-100 cage will be very big. Very, very big. That's OK if you really want

  Sorry, I can't agree.  The cards are no larger (smaller than most, in
fact) than any other type, and the inter-card distance is no different.
I've seen cages raging from 3-slot to 21-slot.  The power supplies, on the
other hand, were usually big, simple, and heavy :-/.

> to use all of that volume for electronics. However, nowadays that takes a lot
> of parts. When the S-100 was first popular it took a whole board just for the
> processor & support - another for 16K or RAM, etc. A stuffed card cage would
> have you running a 64K 8080 system with (gasp!) a printer and (wow!) a TVT
> and matbe you could have room for one card of experimentation real estate.

  Yup.  64K bytes worth of 4k bit chips took a lot of cards.  Nowadays you
can buy megabytes on a card, just like for any other bus.

>..
> The S-100 signals are just TTL-level with some passive termination at one
> end. 

  I nearly always had active termination.

> There was bitching about the S-100 crosstalk even in the days of 4MHz
> Z-80 systems - they were just too darn fast. With edge rate control you
> can push the performance into the low 10's but the S-100 backplane is
> pretty unsophisticated and I'd expect you to see some flaky performance
> if you try to go full speed (like 25MHz).
> ...
  
  Agreed.

>...  
> Probably a good place to sort this out would be a PC magazine and/or Byte.
> any of those are 80+% ads. Some of them will have to appeal to you. The Byte
> issues for December of each year used to have index sections for the year's
> articles - you can probably find stuff about the various buses in there, in
> more detail and religious fervor than you may want.

  There is a magazine devoted to various bus architectures, including the
IEEE/696 (S100).  If there is interest, I can post the essentials.
--
/kenw

Ken Wallewein                                                     A L B E R T A
kenw@noah.arc.ab.ca                                             R E S E A R C H
(403)297-2660                                                     C O U N C I L