News & Pointers: S-100, CP/M And Related Sites
links for 2010
Nov 2010: There is an Australian Microbee preservation group, the Microbee Software Preservation Project (MSPP). There's a forum and a software and firmware repository. The Microbee was first produced in 1982 and forwards, as a Z80 system with CP/M on floppy and a Synertek 6545 CRT for video. Founders of the company previously produced S-100 cards as "Applied Technology". It's not clear from other references, if the MicroBee itself was S-100 capable. (From comp.sys.tandy posts and notes in Wikipedia, and from notes on the Applied Technology page of thepcmuseum.com .
Oct 2010: In response to my question about active BBS's, John Crane posted in comp.sys.northstar: "These BBSs are definitely "endangered". I remember when there were 100+ in my state alone. Now the [dialup] list is down to 31 total. [Lists are maintained on this linked Web site page.] I also use [my NorthStar Horizon] as a terminal to a local Unix machine, so I get netnews, telnet, ftp, etc. through the Horizon as well. Pretty useful for 70's tech. And it looks good sitting on the desk with an aluminum Hayes modem on top. No Chinese plastic anywhere!"
Crane continues: "In a similar vein, one of my IMSAI's was used to run a BBS back in the 80's The hard drive is still loaded with all the software and I've toyed with the idea of bringing up a BBS catering to the vintage computer crowd. But I figure I'd spend a week or two getting everything to work the way I want and then maybe 5 guys call it in the span of a year. So I never thought it worthwhile. - John"
Dave Perrussel, who operates the telentbbsguide.com Web site, had a response in 2010 to the above comments: "BTW - there are more than 31 BBSes out there. It's in the neighborhood of 400. It's that the old school dial-up BBS is almost but gone. The rest are [reachable by] either Telnet or SSH." I acknowledged his support, for listing non-Telnet dial-ups on his site. However, his site say BBS systems were "developed back when MS-DOS was king". When I challenged him and said that dial-up BBS systems began with the computers of the 1970's including CP/M systems, he claimed BBS's "really didn't become popular until the 1990s". I often run into an argument that CP/M and 1970's systems were not "popular", and therefore they don't really count. So being first doesn't count? ;)
Aug 2010: Dave Griffin was again offering the P112 Z180 single-board computer. Here's a link to a few more details and other Web links. There are earlier mentions of this kit in older links below on this page. Note: Griffin cancelled the offer due to lack of presales, in Oct 2010. But the link references some P112 archives and others have since built variations of it.
Also in August 2010: F. J. Krann has some information on the WD1002 board on his site. It's an old SASI to floppy and hard drive interface card. He found information apparently at bitsavers.org as well.Krann has a lot of other information about vintage computers as well. THis month, he's working on a pair of ECB (Eurobus) video cards with the NEC NEC7220D video processor chip. Look around his site for info.
July 2010:
In July 2010, I was contacted by Pascal Microengine owner M. R. Wigan. On his Web site he discusses the history of Western Digital's hardware chipset and products that were used for UCSD Pascal, Ada, and DEC's LSI-11. I discuss Pascal and more about Dr. Wigan on my Pascal Web page. He is also a current and early member of an Australian computer club still active today. He discusses the MICOM club on this page of his site.
june 2010: James Moxham, AKA "Dr Acula", is working on a wireless network using Z80's (both real and emulated), CP/M and MP/M. His network was a mix of N8VEM Z80 systems, Microchip Propeller processor boards running emulated Z80's under "ZiCog", and some sensor nodes using the PicAXE processor. Discussion is over several Web sites and several blogs - I don't pretend I can follow it all. A little discussion survived into the 2020's at this Web link.
April 1st: Ed Roberts, S-100 creator, died April 1st 2010. Follow this link for more information.
In March I was looking around the Web, and happened to find This "ISO 7185 STANDARD PASCAL" Web page. It's a current and comprehensive site for Pascal compilers past and present, and supports current Pascal international standards. There's also a complete PDF collection of the "Pascal Users Group" newsletters, from the 1970's when they were a part of microcomputing history to may Pascal readily available. The "P code" interterpreter to run the Pascal compiler is very portable and many early Pascals on minicomputers and microcomputers used this scheme.
A Feb post in comp.os.cpm refers to the YASBEC Z180 single-board computer, first offered in 1991. The poster notes that an archive for YASBEC docs is at the "maben" archive site.. Another site with YASBEC information and software is at this copy of Hal Bower's 8-bit Web page section, where he offers software he developed for the product and other Z80/Z180 systems. It's in a compressed format of LBR and LZH files. To decompress Hal's .?y? LZH 2.0 files, I found an archive of Jay Sage's ZNODE3 with this UNLZHCPM program in MSDOS which will apparently decompress Hal's files in an MS-DOS window of Windows.
One CP/M file archive site is this Web site by Marko M�kel� at zimmers.net. These seem to be copies of a former archive at ftp.funet.fi .Many of these archives are compressed, and old CP/M compression schemes vary a lot. The "CP/M FAQ" says to look at Simtel's MSDOS archive under "compress", to find MS-DOS utilities to decompress them.
Nov-Dec 2009
In usenet group comp.os.cpm I saw a reference to a DOSBox project with a DOSBox web page at this link.Its' another open-source Intel/MS-DOS hardware emulator. It seems to support older and more general hardware than some, the page mentions 286/386 hardware, as well as emulations of various IBM PC classic hardware. It's mentioned as supporting CP/M-86. But SIMH is often the emulator of choice among vintage system owners, for supporting older mini and microcompters.
Dec 2009: Stewart Kay posts in comp.os.cpm about the Z80EM86 Z80 emulator he wrote in the early 1990's, and has recently re-released. "Z80em86 is NOT a CP/M emulator. It simply emulates a Z80 CPU (documented instructions only) and also has some support to emulate various bits of hardware that would be required by an operating system. The README file describes z80em86. There is a CP/M 3 operating system I wrote that can be booted by z80em86 but the emulator can run any operating system if one wants to code it up, and the documentation has the necessary details for doing so. The CP/M 3 system has a README file that describes the operations of the system." The emulator runs as a 16 bit application in Windows and Linux/DOSEMU.
In 2021, the only thing I could find was z80em86 sources and binaries
apparently saved at the CP/M Archive.
The last editor of The Computer Journal, a small press publication on microcomputing, has now PDF'ed all the back
issues of that magazine and put them on his Web site. Bill Kibler of Kibler Electronics has an archive of TCJ on his Web site.. I wrote about a dozen articles on S-100 for TCJ. A number of
developers in the 1990's published articles in TCJ.
A Windows diskette imaging utility called OmniFlop, has apparently been around for a few years for the BBC/Acorn/Spectrum community. This Web page describes OmniFlop.. There's a companion OmniDisk for MS-DOS.
Here's a Z80 and FPGA project I came across.
The V6Z80P is a Z80 associated with a Xilinx Spartan II FPGA, on a surface-mount card developed by "Phil" in the UK. The FPGA supports video and other interfaces, and is reprogrammable so part of the development is on the FPGA side. I've emailed him, he's been very kind in his discussions with me. He says he may order some boards and parts in NOvember 2009, which he assembles and offers when available. It's a "hobby" project so his price reflects costs, he says.
As of the 2020's, I've updated the Web link; he still sells parts but this project may be retired.
Sept 2009
There is more work on the YAZE-AG, Yet Another Z80 Emulator by Andreas Gerlic. While 2.20.1 was the latest and "last" completed version, a version 2.30 is in development as of Oct 2009. "yaze-ag is designed to provide an exact simulation of the Z80 microprocessor on a UNIX (Solaris), Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X or Windows system (cygwin environment)." As of 2021, the final release was 2.51.1.1.
The German site, 8bit-museum.de has a section of photos of computer boards including S-100 cards called "the PCB-Gallery". The photos are well-taken with good lighting. The site is otherwise in German, but Google offers translating services. For English-only speakers, German with technical content is somewhat readable.
June-Aug 2009
Mike Sharkey had sme Z-80 and S-100 Web pages.links for 2009
The Norway-based (Dutch-language) site nostalgia8.nl of "Katzy" has had some Dr. LOGO documents from Digital Research, as provided via Emmanuel Roche. By 2009, there are more Dr. Logo programs there.
John Monahan wrote to me and said: "I am now in the process of putting together an S100 Web site. I have started off with hardware & software discussions about the board(s). While the site is still not ready for general consumption I thought you might like an early look. Any comments/bugs etc please do not hesitate. Check my notes above for details and current status.
In a private email, Les Bird of the Society of Eight-Bit Heathkit Computerists (SEBHC) archive site alerted me to that organization and their Web archive. Check my notes above for details. The SEBHC site has moved a few times, as of 2021 it's on github and also has a google discussion group.
may 2009
Noted in comp.os.cpm was a Web site which offers a 1980's CP/M compatible Z80 OS called "QP/M". Microcode Consulting's QP/M is noted to be CP/M compatible but adds features like date-stamping. BIOS for a few specific Z80 systems are also offered. Additionally the site offers plug-in BIOS support for hard drives, debugging tools, and an assembly linker. As of 2019, these appear to be free but without warranty.
Random Web search for "compupro S-100" found this article from May 2009 in The Register UK, on Rik Myslewski's 1982 assembling of a Compupro system.
In comp.os.cpm in early May, someone posted this Web link to mycpu.eu by Dennis Kusche. The site supports a TTL-based 8-bit computer, which apparently has most of the capabilities of a simple, modern personal computer. It includes compilers, Ethernet and TCP/IP support (the site operates from one model!), VGA video, IDE hard drive, and more. The card size is the small Eurocard; it takes six cards to make a minimal system. More interesting, there is a Homebuilt CPUs Web Ring and this site is a member. Apparently, there is a German Web site and company which offers something about MyCPU.
In comp.os.cpm in early May, Andrew Lynch announced a proposed "new" S-100 six-slot motherboard, with termination very very similar to the Compupro design. Lynch developed this as an adjunct to his N8VEM Z80 Eurocard-bus computer project, which he has offered as open designs and at-cost circuit boards for a few years. N8VEM became retrocomputers.org, follow the Web link.
In comp.os.cpm, Dave Griffith announced he may make another round of P112 boards. The P112 is a Z180 computer originally designed and produced by David Brooks of Australia in the 1990's. In 2004 and forwards it was independently produced (intermittantly) by David Griffith. It incorporated a GIDE like interface. For more info and links, check my P112 notes.
April 2009
A New York Times video Feb 05 2009 on Halted Specialities which has sold surplus electronics in Silicon Valley for decades.
In April 2009, Marcus Bennett posted in comp.os.cpm on converting 3.5-inch floppy drives to work as 8-inch drives. "Dear All: Get ready to use 3.5 inch diskette drives instead of those big and noisy 8 inch drives on your Cromemco (and therefore any other CPM) genre computers .[link to blog entry at majzel.com has expired]". I reference this also on my Web page of diskette drive technical data. In the years since, many people have modified certain 3.5" floppy drives to run at 350 RPM and act like 8-inch floppy drives.
In 2009, J G Harston posted in comp.os.cpm: "My Z80Tube [emulator] has been happily running on my 16M ARM7DTI coprocessor [as on this Web page]. IN private discussion he told me: "It runs on an ARM. It will run on any ARM OS that provides the minimal core ARM I/O calls (OS_RDCH, OS_WRCH, OS_File, OS_Args, OS_Find, OS_BGet, OS_BPut, OS_GBPB) such as Arthur, RISC OS, RiscIX, ARMTubeOS, and various ARM development system OSs. It should run on ARM-based Linux, but I don't have the ability to test it."
"There's also a 'C' version which will run on anything that will compile 'C' code at the mdfs site. I've had that working on Windows 3, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XT, Intel Linux, ARM RiscIX, ARM Linux, ARM RISC OS, Intel DOS. Somebody reported it running ok on a Mac."
A customer asked me about SCION (brand) Microangelo documentation which I did not have. In looking around the Web, I found A private Web page on a Microangelo redesign by Dwane Elscott. He describes S-100 as his "first home computer" and also at his first professional job site, where they used the Microangelo. He wire-wrapped a "clone" at home. Years later, although he acquired that computer from his company, he designed a compatible board set to run from his Zerox 820 and other CP/M computers. Details of the design are not on his site, but it's a typical story from the era. Butg by 2021, the private site is gone.
Did you know that AutoCAD ran on S-100 boards?. In this interview of AutoCAD co-founder and first CEO John Walker, by Kean Walmsley in 2008, Walker says the Marinchip 9900 S-100 graphics board was AutoCAD's first hardware platform. A photo of him with this card is on Walmsley's blog Web site. Walker has written an on-line book about AutoCAD's early years, which is on his Web site. It's in large part an accumulation of company documents and notes. (It also happens that I have a Z-100 version of AutoCAD.)
mar 2009
Alex Freed and his Apple II Z80 card were mentioned a few times in comp.os.cpm. The Apple II could run CP/M 2.2 or CP/M Plus thanks to a slave Z80 card. A number of companies made these including Microsoft. Alex designed his own in 2008-09. IN 2021 I found some surviving version as Project 26 on this Web page.
Feb 2009:
I had some discussions with Jonathan Graham Harston about the Z80 banked memory hardware he mentions on his Web site. This was part of a recent comp.os.cpm discussion about MP/M memory management. The link in this note is to my 2005 link to his Web site. By the way, his site was part of the CP/M Web Ring. Web Rings are (or were)