Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!van-bc!ubc-cs!alberta!alberta!arcsun.arc.ab.ca!arcsun!kenw From: kenw@skyler.arc.ab.ca (Ken Wallewein) Newsgroups: sci.electronics Subject: Re: S100 question Message-ID: Date: 29 Jan 91 21:00:32 GMT References: <83946@unix.cis.pitt.edu> <1991Jan28.140632.20240@mlb.semi.harris.com> Sender: nobody@arc.ab.ca (Absolutely Nobody) Organization: Alberta Research Council, Calgary Alberta, Canada Lines: 48 In-Reply-To: jws@cica4.mlb.semi.harris.com's message of 28 Jan 91 14:06:32 GMT 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