Hi John,

The bus carried +12 & -12 volts, typically regulated down to +5 or -5 on the 96 pin boards inserted into the passive backplane. Lots of power required to run those beasties. I owned 2-3 froma company in Huntington Beach, California by the name of NNC Computers (NNC = No Name Computers <g>). The fun part was Nimh, a Vietnamese immigrant who worked for Sandy Watson, the owner. Nimn assembled the computers and also made the wiring. Apparently what you'd do is take single wires and kind of bunch them together and run them through an acetone solution where the outer covering would dissolve just a little and when the acetone dissipated they would glue themselves togethr making a ribbon.

Well... Usually everything went along smoothly but occassionally Nimh, who happened to be colorblind (see where this is going? <g>) would reverse a few wires. Now, to power those S-100 beasts it required some very large capacitors. Usually 3-4 inches wide and 8-10 inches high. Nimh would power the backplane down, plug in a S-100 board to test and when he turned the power back on *BANG!* the 5 volt regulator on the S-100 board would be propelled at great speeds across the warehouse, usually followed by some loud cursing from Sandy in his office, "G** D***** Nimh!" or something like that. <g> Sandy didn't like to fry $1500 S-100 boards. <g>



>I beg to differ, Tom.
>
>The S-100 was a bus architecture, not a computer itself. IMSAI's computer was simply known as the 8080. MITS' computer was the Altair 8800.
>
>Many other computer manufacturers adopted the S-100 bus and I'd hazard an educated guess that most CP/M and TurboDOS systems ran on S-100 bug computers.
>
>
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>>Yes - and that became the S-100. My confusion was that Altair was in New Mexico - I read an article that said Hayward, CA, where we lived at one time. IMSAI (the S-100 I owned) was in San Leandro, near Hayward. They will have to make some corrections at the San Jose Technical Museum as to the history of all this. :)
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