Tom,

>David;
>
>How about a Kansas City Tape Drive? They were "the thing" in the mid 1970's. Much faster than the standard drives. It only took 15 minutes to load Basic. Gee, I wonder why Bill Gates and that small company in New Mexico that made the plug in card with CPM and Basic on it became so well liked? Turn on the computer and it would boot up with basic already loaded. Ah, the good old S-100 Bus - now that was my first computer. Lots of iron and steel! No whimpy switching power supplies - they had real iron cores, full wave retification and filtering. A 10 Meg hard disk for the S-100 was only $6000 in 1982. Then there were the 8" floppies (which many "experts" tell me never existed). 241K on a single sided floppy. 64K of RAM (unbanked).
>
>Tom

I owned a couple of S-100 computers. Made by a company by NNC (No Name Computers) in Huntington Beach. Owned by Sandy Watson. He had a young fellow making his wire harnesses who was colorblind (!!!). Every so often, when doing the requisite 'smoke test', the wires would get crossed and you'd hear a loud "bang!" and a voltage regulator would fly across the room. <g>

We used both CP/M & the Oasis O/S which was created by Timothy S. Williams and one of the then-best basic interpreters out there. Ten users on a 4Mhz Z-80. <g>