S-100 bus termination

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sat Jul 25 09:45:34 1998

< > terminator. Do all S-100 buses require external termination, or did m

< Only the motherboards that didn't have active termination require a
< terminator. In my experience, that's a fair number of mobo's out there

My experience with 4 or 5 crates I have and many I've built up.

If it runs well or the bus looks clean to the O'scope skip it. Some busses
it's helps but still look terrible (altair with the original backplanes).
My Northstar Horizon never needed one and it's currently running at 8mhz.
The VectorMX box I have with Compupro backplane needed the terminators
installed for 10mhz. The CCS I'm using with discus hard disk and 8"
floppy doesn't require it at 4mhz or 6mhz.

One thing that seems to be true, the longer the backplane the more likely
it will ring and need termination. All Altairs seem to and IMSAIs seem
to benefit if the cpu is z80 4mhz. The quietest unterminated or
terminated backplane I own is an oddball 6 slot I have that is 4 layer
technology with ground and power are on the middle two layers.

I've found a few badly designed cpu cards and memory cards that were
terrible in that they would introduce noise onto an otherwise quiet bus!

Allison
Received on Sat Jul 25 1998 - 09:45:34 BST

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