From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:info-cpm Newsgroups: fa.info-cpm Title: Selecting S-100 Boards: Disk Controllers Article-I.D.: ucb.1693 Posted: Wed Aug 4 02:56:09 1982 Received: Wed Aug 4 06:34:01 1982 >From DAN@Mit-Ml Wed Aug 4 02:55:58 1982 While helping a friend select boards for his S-100 system, we realized the difficulty in choosing one board over another. Besides the problem of catalog descriptions making even the worst board look great, the "trusted" names in S-100 stuff (Godbout, Morrow, etc.) have to manufacture boards which are similar, but have "minor" differences (e.g. Morrow sells four stock versions of Disk Jockeys: Memory Mapped at E000, Memory Mapped at F800, I/O Mapped, and DMA). For starters, I'd like to conduct an S-100 Floppy Disk Controller survey. If you own or use an S-100 system with a disk controller, I'd like to know your experiences with it. Here's the info that I'd like to collect: 1. The Make, Model Number, and year of manufacture of the Disk Controller. 2. Number of years that you've used the controller. 3. Features that the board has that you like (or feel worth mentioning). 4. Features that the board lacks which you wish it had. 5. Reliability info: Does the board run "forever", does it have a habit of dying, etc. 6. Service record: Number of hardware failures, and number of repairs. 7. Software support: CP/M included? Ease of modifying BIOS. 8. Documentation: Good board documentation? Good configuration/BIOS documentation? 9. If you've had to deal with the manufacturer, are they helpful? 10. Any other info which you consider important. If you wish to respond to this survey, please send your replies to DAN@MIT-ML. Please be terse (i.e. I don't need detailed hardware descriptions of your board). In a week or so, I'll crunch all the replies and make the survey results available. Individual replies will be kept confidential (as usual). I am especially interested in hearing from people using the newer DMA controllers. Please do NOT send info about S-100 Hard Disk Controllers (yet). I know that there are alot of people out there who use S-100 Floppy Disk Controllers, so any info would be greatly appreciated. Dan