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From: hankd@ee.ecn.purdue.edu (Hank Dietz)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Why IBM went for the 8088 -- The Untold Story
Summary: S100 was more stable than one might think
Keywords: S100, Parallel Ports
Message-ID: <1990May25.130311.13304@ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 25 May 90 13:03:11 GMT
References: <1WWjqN#0SBCWN5sLFYH9X6tz009zLSK=eric@snark.uu.net> <1990May23.154706.16476@sq.sq.com>
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In article <1990May23.154706.16476@sq.sq.com> ian@sq.sq.com (Ian F. Darwin) writes:
>Many of those micro makers based their products on what was then called the
>S100 bus. Early S100 systems were plagued by inter-vendor incompatibilities,

Yes and no.  Companies like Cromemco and NorthStar had some extensions which
allowed for things like bank-switched memory (up to 512K on a z80!) and
these extensions were often not compatible, but most S100 boards could
pretty much be pulled from one system and stuck in another at will (although
in those days the user might be expected to cut a board trace or two... ;-).
The S100 boards were also a good size (not too big, not too small) and there
were plenty of boards available to do interesting things like analog I/O.
It was mostly the later S100 machines (e.g., 16-bit) that made the IEEE
standard necessary.  Ah...  the good old days when machines were simple.

						-hankd@ecn.purdue.edu

PS: The big problem I remember from way back was that timing for the
    parallel printer interface was not standardized so you often would have
    to throw a little circuit into your printer cable.  This was why most of
    us simply avoided parallel printers back then.  Serial current loop was
    much more standard.  :-)