4 ms·

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/before-os2-was-os2/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/before-os2-was-os2/ I assume that most users of S-100 systems were technical users

• fernly 10y ago
  A number of small companies sold packaged S-100 systems with customized CP/M provided. I bought an S-100 bus box from "California Computer Systems" which included a serial port board and disk interface board, and they provided a BIOS set up for those devices. They also provided the source, and over a couple of years I modified the BIOS several times, adding devices and improving things generally. But lots of people bought turnkey systems like the Sol [1] and IMSAI [2] and never touched the BIOS. [1] http://www.oldcomputers.net/sol-20.html http://www.oldcomputers.net/sol-20.html [2] http://imsai.net/ http://imsai.net/
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    I do wonder if there is room for a solution like the S-100 bus these days. That is perhaps the one thing that irks me about todays computers, that the motherboard is dictated by the CPU socket soldered on.
    • mark-r 10y ago
      The capabilities built into today's chip sets and motherboards is just insane. This weekend was the first time I plugged a board into a PC in over 10 years, to add USB 3.0 to a system too old to have had it already. The last PC I put together was based on a mini-ITX motherboard, simply because I knew from experience that I wouldn't need anything more expandable than that.
    • rbanffy 10y ago
      I don't think it'd be easy considering the speeds you expect from the various buses. You could put everything on a PCIe card and let it drive a backplane through a specialized connector, but that wouldn't be like S-100. A couple weeks back I was thinking about building a backplane that would allow a bunch of BBC Microbits to cooperate. That, too, would not be like an S-100 bus.
  • mark-r 10y ago
    My first computer was put together from pieces, but at its heart was a CCS case, backplane, and power supply. It was a happy medium between totally geeked out (IMSAI) and dumbed down (Sol). Of course I wrote my own BIOS from scratch.
• whyenot 10y ago
  Yes, at least in the early hobbyist phase. When you bought a machine (or parts of a machine, the line is a little blurry with S-100 bus), you usually also got the ASM source code for the BIOS. If you wanted to add a printer or other peripheral usually you had to make changes to the BIOS and recompile. It was actually pretty easy, the source code had a lot of comments and was easy to modify. Later on, vendors such as CompuPro sold complete "turnkey" S-100 bus systems that were intended for less technical users.
• slededit 10y ago
  I wrote a bios to try to get CP/M up and running on my IMSAI. It does require a lot of deep knowledge about the machine which admittedly was more common in those days. However I suspect most people bought a pre-packaged system. If you were doing most of your coding in BASIC its unlikely you'd be able to modify the BIOS.
• blater 10y ago
  Depends on context. In the early days many s100 users assembled the boards themselves and doubtless wouldn't have blinked any eyelid at hacking 8080/z80 bios code if they needed to (I remember the first kid at school to get a computer around that time, programmable with physical switches, binary LED display). By the time the commercial software market for CP/M became established with killer apps like word star, the users would have been rightly horrified by bios hacking.
  • yuhong 10y ago
    Of course, MS was also not as willing to provide the MS-DOS OAKs/BAKs to random users than DR was with CP/M. When they finally stopping copying the model before OS/2 1.0 was released, they still did things like putting the floppy and hard drive drivers in the same file.
    • EvanAnderson 10y ago
      Reference for people like me who didn't recognize the acronym OAK: "OEM Adaptaion Kit", <http://www.os2museum.com/wp/ms-dos-oaks/> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/ms-dos-oaks/>
      • yuhong 10y ago
        And BAK stands for Binary Adaptation Kit.