Images of Seattle Computer Proudcts (SCP) S-100 boards
monahanz
site listed below, I have started on the Seattle Computer Products
section.
Unfortunately I cannot find anywhere good color images of their
flagship 8086 and 8086 Support S-100 boards. Does anybody have any
kind of images of these boards or know somebody that does.
Thanks
John Monahan
www.S100Computers.com
Barry Watzman
could take a set of photos (not as easy as it sounds given where the
boards are, but I do have them, all 4 of the relevant boards).
[And, FWIW, I recently sold one of the non-IEEE 696 memory boards on
E-Bay, which would be a 5th board). That one had a photo in the auction
(not a great one, but a photo), and the auction was sufficiently recent
that you can still find it.]
[The 4 boards are the 8086 CPU card, the CPU support card, the 4-port
serial card and the IEEE 696 memory card (16K; that part sucks!!)).
FWIW, I believe that I have one of the best collections of classic
computer documentation; and I donated almost all of it to Howard Harte,
who posted a lot of it and then stopped when he ran out of space. It's
over 83,000 files, it no longer fits on a DVD (I can still get it on a
dual layer DVD, however). I am pretty sure that Herb Johnson has the
BEST single collection, but his collection is hard copy, which is very
much a double edged sword.
At one point I started to include board photos in my collection but I
never got very far with that.
I have decided to offer my copy of ORIGINAL SCP 86-DOS for sale on
E-Bay. I am considering a $5,000 Buy-It-Now price with an "or best
offer" option. I'm curious as to what people think of the price. It is
a full original set, with both original documentation (in SCP binders)
and original 8" diskettes, I think it goes from verion 0.33 to 2.0 (by
which time it was called MS-DOS). It will appear on E-Bay within the
next 90 days. Am I nuts on the price? What do you think it's worth?
The auction will have a good set of photographs of both the diskettes
and manuals. This will be software only, I am not planning to sell the
boards at this time.
[FWIW, regarding selling the boards or getting the system running: The
critical board is the CPU support board, which has a serial and parallel
port on it (e.g. ... console and printer). You don't need the SCP CPU
card; when I ran 86-DOS in the 1980's, in fact, I used a CompuPro
8085/8088 dual CPU card, not the SCP card, because I wanted to be able
to boot either CP/M or 86-DOS. And you don't need the add-on serial
card unless you want extra serial ports, and once you get the system
running, you can modify the BIOS anyway (it was as configurable as CP/M).
dott.Piergiorgio
> I have decided to offer my copy of ORIGINAL SCP 86-DOS for sale on
> E-Bay. I am considering a $5,000 Buy-It-Now price with an "or best
> offer" option. I'm curious as to what people think of the price.
Well, in the Italian NG on retrocomputing you will be flamed to death...
> Am I nuts on the price?
From my Italian perspective, yes, but I don't known much about US of A
quotations in general.....
Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.
Herbert Johnson
> FWIW, I believe that I have one of the best collections of classic
> computer documentation; and I donated almost all of it to Howard Harte,
> who posted a lot of it and then stopped when he ran out of space. It's
> over 83,000 files, it no longer fits on a DVD (I can still get it on a
> dual layer DVD, however). I am pretty sure that Herb Johnson has the
> BEST single collection, but his collection is hard copy, which is very
> much a double edged sword.
>
> At one point I started to include board photos in my collection but I
> never got very far with that.
Hey, Barry! Not to be mean, but..."double edged sword"? Your
explanation above is *exactly* how I justify my methods. I can't
resist to have a little fun with these comments.
Anyone who wants a copy of any manual I have, can have one. For a
modest fee. In a week or so. They are paying their own way, to get
what they need - how "edged" is that "sword"?
They get a good photocopy, on a commercial photocopier, great
resolution. Not color...but most manuals are not in color. No
photos...but mostly they have the *board itself* in hand! I'm not Web-
spaced limited; my manuals collection is in a few file cabinets. I
list my manuals with a few bytes of text on my Web site to describe
them.
Yeah, that "text" stuff, on paper, on the Web. Oh so 20th
century...just like S-100 stuff...funny how that works.
Now, Web based archives are important. They are good for saving files,
they create a presence of information, they provide that "click and
it's mine" access that people love today. But *archives for the long
term*? Kind of a problem. Kind of expensive, if only one person is
paying for all. This is what you said, Barry!
And, in my opinion, archives alone are not enough, you need to capture
some history, capture some knowledge. Correct the common wisdom. But
everyone does what they can, and collectively things get "covered".
The "good" actually done, should not be the enemy of someone's idea of
"the best".
So I don't have to argue about things like "history" or "storage" or
"costs" or "free". Those who are active, make their own case for the
preservation they do. More activity, more coverage. But... even
"free" costs somebody something, and personal resources have limits,
eventually. The ultimate "double edge sword", Barry, is that we all
die and all materials decay. When you work with 35-year-old computers,
when you are over 50, that's not morbid thinking, that's planning
ahead!
So, good luck with that $5000 SCP "retirement plan", Barry! I hope you
get twice that. ;) But, I suggest you make a Web site on the
collection, show it off - and make sure people know what it IS, beyond
docs and disks from that company what made Bill Gates a billionaire.
You are in the best position to do that, you were there, you have the
docs!
Herb Johnson
retrotechnology.com
preserving history, 20 cents a page
monahanz
(who knows nothing about S100 systems) selling an IMSAI and Horizon
both packed with boards along with a lot of other junk with a starting
bid of $3000. Lets see how it goes.
I would suggest Barry "dressing it up", nice pictures, history (as
only you can give) and scatter links through the web, then eBay it.
Good luck with it.
Richard A. Cini
"Barry Watzman" <Watzma...@neo.rr.com> wrote:
> I have decided to offer my copy of ORIGINAL SCP 86-DOS for sale on
> E-Bay. I am considering a $5,000 Buy-It-Now price with an "or best
> offer" option. I'm curious as to what people think of the price. It is
> a full original set, with both original documentation (in SCP binders)
> and original 8" diskettes, I think it goes from verion 0.33 to 2.0 (by
> which time it was called MS-DOS). It will appear on E-Bay within the
> next 90 days. Am I nuts on the price? What do you think it's worth?
> The auction will have a good set of photographs of both the diskettes
> and manuals. This will be software only, I am not planning to sell the
> boards at this time.
Barry --
Out of curiosity, was the underlying code for 86-DOS ever available?
I've seen a copy of the (well, at least a) monitor and the bootstrap loader
but not DOS itself or any of the included utilities or command interpreter.
Was it structured like what we know about MS-DOS -- with two files -- the
I/O HAL and DOS itself? I know that one begot the other but I didn't know
what kind of changes Microsoft may have made after they purchased it from
SCP.
On the question of price, that's a tough call. $5k sounds like a lot to
me but I don't think I've ever seen a copy of 86-DOS on the market before
either. A "best offer" option sounds very sensible.
Hold the laughter, but I've seen old copies of Windows 1.01 go for only
low-three-digits with the box and manuals. Ok, it's not a true comp, but
it's the oldest Microsoft PC program I can recall being sold on eBay. Even
the Altair BASIC cassette tape that was sold a few months back went for $100
or less (IIRC).
Before you sell it, though, you should make sure that you have good
archival copies of the manuals and disks for preservation purposes. In the
one copy of the manuals I saw, the schematic scans were lacking some detail
-- parts seem to have gotten lost in the "gutter" of the binding so it is
hard to paste them together. I have some spare time (and equipment) and I
could make better scans for you if you'd like. Good quality pictures of the
boards would be good, too. You could even scan the boards in color if you
have a flatbed scanner handy.
Just my $0.02 of course.
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.altair32.com
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
Barry Watzman
SPECTACULARLY GOOD E-Bay auctions. It will be "well dressed". I promise.
As to what it's worth, I have no idea. Maybe only a couple hundred
dollars, maybe $10,000 (anyone think that somehow, Tim Patterson himself
doesn't have a genuine, old copy of the original SCP stuff? Stranger
things have happened.] My plan is to offer it as a "Buy It Now" (no
auction) for $5,000 but with an "or best offer" option so if someone
wants to make me an offer for less .... they can do so (and I can accept
or reject that offer).
I saw the Imsai/NorthStar item. I think it's way over priced. The
condition of the stuff didn't look that good. IMSAI's go for a thousand
or so, the NorthStar is worth a lot less, but $3,000 is too much.
[I MAY also, sometime this summer or fall, offer an IMSAI with a
complete set of boards, and a SOL-20 ***with a Helios disk system***; I
have two of each of those right now and I don't need two of them.] The
SOL/Helios (both pairs) were working in 2004 and they be the last
surviving "possibly still working" Helios' on the planet. If not, there
are ***VERY*** few of them.]
Barry Watzman
86-DOS was never officially released (it could be disassembled without
TOO much difficulty, and probably has been, but the official code was
never officially released that I know of).
And you are correct, the ROM monitor source code was provided, and, like
CP/M, the boot loader and BIOS code were provide, indeed they had to be,
as the original pre-Microsoft releases ran on S-100 hardware and had to
be customized for every configuration. I have the customization
documents, they were part of the package.
And yes, it was structured as two files, IO.SYS (the BIOS) and
MS-DOS.SYS (I don't remember the name that it had before MS bought it),
and you customized IO.SYS, for which source code was available.
BTW, I have versions 0.33, 0.34, 1.00, 1.25 and 2.00. The last two were
called MS-DOS and came out after MS bought 86-DOS from SCP.
I am not selling the boards, but if I have convenient access to them (I
don't at the moment; I know where they are, but it would take effort and
a lot of box moving to get to them) I probably will photograph or scan them.
As to 86-DOS, the value of this item is greater if I do NOT make copies.
Not to mention that making copies AND selling the originals is
probably a copyright violation.
But I do have copies of the hardware manuals and, in fact, I believe I
gave them to Howard Harte to post on the web. And those copies were
color (where it was appropriate, which was not everywhere) and they were
high quality, you could not do any better. I have a good copier as long
as the size doesn't exceed something that I can handle in "Legal" size,
which, in the case of the SCP stuff, isn't a problem (but I thank you (I
think it was you) for the assistance you gave me with some of the
34"x22" Heathkit & Zenith Z-100 drawings).
As to value, I don't think that there is any similarity between even
Windows 1.0 and 86-DOS. There were hundreds of thousands of copies of
Windows 1.0. There were, I believe, a few hundred copies of 86-DOS,
with very few of those remaining. I have been on E-Bay for ten years
and I have NEVER seen one.
Richard A. Cini
"Barry Watzman" <Watzma...@neo.rr.com> wrote:
> As to 86-DOS, the value of this item is greater if I do NOT make copies.
> Not to mention that making copies AND selling the originals is
> probably a copyright violation.
I understand this. I didn't anticipate that you would be making additional
copies for sale, but if there are so few remaining (let's say just "one" of
any version) then I'd hate to see it go into the bit bucket by accident. I'm
looking at it from the historical preservation aspect only and nothing else.
> But I do have copies of the hardware manuals and, in fact, I believe I
> gave them to Howard Harte to post on the web. And those copies were
> color (where it was appropriate, which was not everywhere) and they were
> high quality, you could not do any better. I have a good copier as long
> as the size doesn't exceed something that I can handle in "Legal" size,
> which, in the case of the SCP stuff, isn't a problem (but I thank you (I
> think it was you) for the assistance you gave me with some of the
> 34"x22" Heathkit & Zenith Z-100 drawings).
Those are the schematics I was referring to. I printed them and pasted them
together -- there's stuff missing in the printing gutter that makes it hard
to align the multiple sheets. The manual itself was very good quality.
> As to value, I don't think that there is any similarity between even
> Windows 1.0 and 86-DOS. There were hundreds of thousands of copies of
> Windows 1.0. There were, I believe, a few hundred copies of 86-DOS,
> with very few of those remaining. I have been on E-Bay for ten years
> and I have NEVER seen one.
I know there is no direct comparison. I've been on eBay since 1997 and I've
never seen it either. I was just trying to think of something else that
doesn't show up often. Microsoft may have made a million copies, but I've
only seen Windows 1.0 appear 2-3 times.
Rich