S-100 – Ferryhill – Old Computers

According to Wikipedia: “Designed in 1974, the S-100 bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. S-100 computers, consisting of processor and peripheral cards, were produced by a number of manufacturers. The S-100 bus formed the basis for homebrew computers whose builders implemented drivers for CP/M and MP/M. These S-100 microcomputers ran the gamut from hobbyist toy to small business workstation and were common in early home computers until the advent of the IBM PC.”

I bought a cabinet with power supply and the S100 bus, and populated it with various boards. Some of these I bought as bare printed circuit boards and poplulated then with components I bought separately. Others I bought as a kit (i.e. board plus components) and assembled them myself. Those that were too fiddly (e.g. memory boards) I bought pre-assembled. I also bought a cabinet to house 8″ floppy disks and installed two of them.

Initially I ran the CP/M operating system, and subsequently added UCSD Pascal.

This system was the starting point both for research work in the local hospital (Computer-aided Diagnosis of Acute Abdominal Pain) and and to equip a teaching lab at Sussex University.

The system was mothballed 35 years ago. I can’t remember whether it was still working at this point, but on unpacking it wasn’t booting up. So, unless specified otherwise, the “Working condition” of all of these items was “Unknown”.

Integrand 800 Series Mainframe
Integrand Cabinet with 2 x 8 in. Floppy Disk Drives
Hitachi 12 in. Video Monitor (Model VM-129)
GRI Keyboard (Model 771)
2 x 8 in. Floppy Disk Drives
Software and Manuals

Bus Active Terminator – Godbout 106
2 x Z80 CPU Board- Ithica Audio (Rev1.3 -> 1.4, Rev2.0)
2 x 64K RAM Board- Central Data Corp B1008C
2708/2716 EPROM Board – Ithica Audio 1050 (Rev 1.1)
2 x Floppy Disk Controller Board – Micromation Doubler
Video and Keyboard Interface – SSM VB3
Parallel and Serial I/O Board – SSM IO4
PROM Programming Board – SD Systems PROM-100
Real Time Clock Board – Microbus Designs RTC-01
Bus Extender/Logic Probe – Mullen TB-2

Integrand 800 Series Mainframe

Description: Cabinet containing power supply and S-100 bus.

Dimensions and Weight: 52 cm x 43 cm x 20 cm; 8.0 kg.

With: Disk cables for Doubler board; serial line cables; video and keyboard cables for VB3 board; low profile making cards easily available on extender board; IEEE mains input and 3 x IEEE mains outputs; assortment of cables, chips and other small components.