TRW Acquisitions, VCF

From: James Willing <jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com>
Date: Sun Feb 1 17:38:38 1998

At 09:44 AM 2/1/98 -0800, you wrote:
>> I have several leads on people with S-100 boards so if you are looking for
>> something specific, let me know. Can't promise anything except that I will
>> check around. I would think that most, if not all, S-100 stuff would work
>> in the Altair.

>It depends. Most later good-quality boards follow the IEEE-696
>standard, which requires modifications to the front panel circuitry
>of a Altair or IMSAI.

And make sure that they are still 8-bit boards! Some of the later
Godbout/Ithica Audio, etc. stuff went to 16 bit which will freak out an
Altair/IMSAI front panel something awful!

>And the Altair backplane is so poorly designed that it's nearly impossible
>to run a CPU above 2 MHz in it

Well... I'll take minor exception to this statement. I ran (and still do)
the Cromemco (and other) Z-80 boards at 4mHz with little difficulty, and
saw others get tweaked as high as 10mHz!

>Some improvement is had by installing Compupro/Godbout terminators at the
far end.

No dispute here... Termination is good! I tended to add it to most of my
machines in later days.

-jim

---
jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com
The Computer Garage - http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw
Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174
Received on Sun Feb 01 1998 - 17:38:38 GMT

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