S-100 Bus

From: Dwight Elvey <elvey_at_hal.com>
Date: Wed Oct 6 19:19:52 1999

"Richard Erlacher" <edick_at_idcomm.com> wrote:
>
> If you're an S-100 user, particularly if you have experience in bringing up a
> system from totally dead to totally alive, I'd certainly like to see what your
> impression of your needs from such a device might be.
>
> Dick


Hi Dick
 I've only brought one IMSAI up from the dead. I only needed
a dual trace oscilloscope but I realize that isn't always
the best option. Way back when, I worked for Intel and
was responsible for test of the UPP product. This had a 4040
on it. I built a cable and interface that allowed
one to replace the 4040 with a Series II development system.
It was not a full logic analyzer, it just did normal read/write
to ROM, RAM and I/O. This combined with an oscilloscope made
a good trouble shooting tool. There isn't really a need to
do 100 MHz operations to make a useful tool. One can make
variable delays to adjust read and write timing to look
for timing issues. The code that ran on the Series II
was done in Forth. This way, one could quickly write a particular
test routine for the particular problem one was trouble shooting,
like one would do on a Sun with open boot. This would be quite
hard to do in a GUI without some kind of command line
macro ability ( the problem with GUI's is that, although a
picture is worth a thousand words, they are often not the
thousand words that you currently need ). Trouble shooting
requires flexibility in test conditions that are much more
varied than what would be used to simply go-nogo test.
Dwight
Received on Wed Oct 06 1999 - 19:19:52 BST