Thinker Toys (was: KFC (was: Mark your calendars for VCF 4.0

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Jun 22 14:33:27 2000

> It was the timing problem... the failure rate (soft) for the alpha
> particle thing was so low you'd see power hits and other gremlins
> first.
>
> S100 system were prone to bus noise (even with wonderbus) so where a
> card was installed could litterally mean fail/flakey/works for the same
> card! Bus termination schemes were used to help but the 22 slot bus was
> too long and a more modest 18 or 12 slot was always more reliable.
>
> Dram cards were by and large trouble as they were most sensitive to timing
> problems. I always ran static for testing and some systems for that
> reason.

I never had the opportunity to work with a machine that was IEEE-696
compliant. I'm assuming you did (Danger Will Robinson!)... were compliant
boards reliable? Do you know of any attempts to retrofit compliance onto
existing S-100 designs?

-dq
Received on Thu Jun 22 2000 - 14:33:27 BST