S-100

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S-100 motherboard

The S-100 bus was designed for 8080 and 8085 but mainly used in many Z80 systems. Being well defined it allowed many manufacturers to produce boards and cases for it, which made manufacture and expansion of a system very easy. Most used CP/M as the operating system on them.

S-100 is short for Standard 100, according to an advertisement by Cromemco on page 2 in the November 1976 issue of BYTE magazine. This was also possibly the first public reference to S-100. Before that it had been known first as the Altair bus, later as the Altair/IMSAI bus, but after a third vendor was added to the list the industry (in reality the competitors to those vendors) decided on a generic term so that they wouldn't have to refer to other companies in their own product advertisements. As the bus used 100 pins it was called Standard 100, or S-100.

A slightly faster and expanded S-100 variant was made into an IEEE standard in 1978, IEEE-696.

References