S100 haul

[Jules Richardson]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 17:45 -0400, Allison wrote:
> If anything they are both generic S100 crates.  Most S100 systems needed at 
> least two serial ports.  One for the console and often if there was a modem 
> one for that.  In my case I used a DEC 100 printer which happens to be a 
> serial interface rather than parallel.  
> 
> Those that did run multiuser often had many more than two ports.  I have 
> a few S100 4 port cards and have seen systems easily capable of running 
> 8 or more users.

I'm pretty sure I saw what looked to be some 4 port cards amongst the
stuff we got.

> So in most cases S100 implies generic system but little beyond that.
> For example for S100 the cpu list included everything up to
> and including 386s!

Definitely saw some info about 68k boards in the things we grabbed -
whether there are any boards to go with that I don't know yet...

Ever heard of a box called Pluto? We found one of those - it's an
aluminium box with a 5V PSU inside and a board containing an 8088 CPU,
ROM, RAM and video. Externally it has 9 pin video and a 15 pin
connector. 

Seperately we have one (possibly two) S100 boards branded as Pluto which
presumably allow a host S100 system to communicate with it.

Just have no idea what it does though. If it's a coprocessor it seems
strange to have video on board, but other than the video there's no
other I/O (there is a large IDC connector inside, but it's not brought
out to the back of the case in any way and looks unused.

Reason it caught my eye is that I used to have one of these Pluto boxes
years ago - say to say I only snagged it for the case and scrapped all
the guts, so I hope it's not something too desirable these days!

cheers

Jules