John;

Do not worry John - I know the difference. Perhaps the way I worded it was not clear. Thank you for your comments. There was a company that bought out IMSAI 8080 stock, renamed the computer and got sued by IMSAI. What a stink! Lots of us bought "goodies" for this other company which I think was something like W W Components? They developed a very nice video card. Another nice S-100 Bus computer was made by California Computer Systems, in Sunnyvale. Morrow and Zenith as well as many others had S-100 Bus computers. There was even a magazine devoted to the S-100 and it seemed to die a few months after the IBM PC hit the market.

Woz and Steve Jobs claim the Apple was the first microcomputer - and according to what I remember the Altair and IMSAI were there first and did more. One thing about the S-100 I remember was it was expensive! A commercial memory card with 16K of RAM ran as much as $795. You could bank RAM to extend the 64K limit, and if you built your own cards (which I did) you could afford to have 256K of banked RAM.

At work I built several S-100 bus computers and we had a 10 Meg hard disk which cost $6000 in 1982. The cabinet had one additional slot for another disk drive- should you be so rich! :)

Tom


>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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