The following S-100 story is from Marcus Lewis, in Nov 2003. See other stories of S-100 owners on this Web page, part of my S-100 Web site. Most recent revision dated May 03 2008. My edits are in []'s. - Herb Johnson
Marcus Lewis: "Mr. Johnson: I just found your site and went through it wth a lot of "I remember that". I am no longer involved with "obsolete" computers, preferring to be a font of knowledge about systems older than the people I work with. I have a couple of comments for you about several machines.
My first machine was a PolyMorphics Systems Poly-88 model 12..." See more of his comments on this system on my Polymorphics Web page.
The Heath/Zenith H/Z-100 was an awesome machine. I had one, with two 5.25", two 8" and a whopping 10 MB hard drive. I also had a 2 MB memory board in it that ran very well. I never did understand about the "PC-DOS 640K limit" since my H-100 had 768K to start with, plus 192K for video. Another MAJOR difference between it and the PC stuff was that there was no "graphics mode" or "text mode". All features were available by default on that machine. The hard drive controller was based on 3 2901 bit slice processors and ran extremely hot. I had a desk fan blowing in the riight side of the box just to keep the drive running, because the 2901's got so hot they would shut down.
Godbout/CompuPro had many different CPU's available. I had a NS16032 board that I never got running. It had the complete National Semi chipset, with CPU, FPU and MMU and would have been a fantastic hacker (1980's term) machine had I had the time and expertise make it work. It ran at 10MHz.
This is a "for-what-it's-worth" email. You have a very nice site, and I will likely follow more links in the near future. Feel free to include any or none of this in your comments about the S-100 bus. - Marc Lewis
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Copyright © 2008 Herb Johnson and Marcus Lewis