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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 includ

by 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.

by fernly 10y ago

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.