[ChuckMcM]

There was an earlier, and to my way of thinking, much better idea at Zilog than the Z8000. That was the Z280 (later christened the Z800) it was a 16 bit machine akin to the 8086 but with upward compatibility with the Z80 and a much nicer architecture. I believe that Godbout made and S-100 card with this processor at one time. I wanted one so badly and yet the 8088 and the IBM-PC steamrolled the industry because "big blue" and all that. Sigh.

[jacquesm]

Ah, memory lane, I love you. The S100 was a great architecture, so incredibly versatile, every component was designed around a standard so solid that it lived for 20 years and likely there are still systems in industrial control in service today (though those would be pretty hard to keep running).

Is anybody on HN aware of S100 systems used in production today?

[systems_glitch]

Aside from the systems we use directly in maintaining other S-100 boxes? Yes!

There are many Dahlgren engraving systems running with S-100 control crates. The boards are mostly Solid State Music whitelabels, except for the actual tool driving boards. They don't break often, but we do sometimes get requests to fix them.

Other S-100 boxes still exist, mostly being used by small old companies who are, frankly, in the "old owner's kids are't going to take this over" death spiral. Whatever they're doing with S-100 still works for them, so they keep running it.

We've got customers running PDP-8s and PDP-11s controlling old CNC machines, so S-100 isn't the oldest thing we still service. I also know of a pile of 286s helping make some super cutting edge silicon...

[jacquesm]

Heh, I knew it :)

Thank you for confirming my hunch. Besides being clever from a technical perspective those systems were also designed in ways that make your average kitchen appliance look flimsy. You could probably drop one from a first floor, end up with a damaged pavement, a fine and and working system ;)

[systems_glitch]

Some of them! Some S-100 stuff is definitely cheese grade construction. We end up repairing a fair number of Altair 8800s of various models for hobbyists and collectors, and they are...not well-designed systems. It's pretty amazing how well S-100 progressed from the initial MITS design, given how slapdash it was.

[jacquesm]

I used some pretty beefy boxes for industrial systems in the 80's and what struck me about them - and of the PCs of that era - is that they were all built to last for decades. Modern stuff is built to last for a couple of years at best in most cases, with some rare exceptions. Flimsy cases, plastic instead of steel. Unserviceable, non-standard and proprietary instead of standardized and repairable. Miniaturized as much as possible instead of open frame. And finally, undocumented versus documented right down to the component level and the software source code.

From a longevity perspective that stuff absolutely rocks, much like I'd much rather have a car from the 90's than one built today. The 90's one will outlive me, the one built today will need at least one replacement.

[canucker2016]

One story I heard was about Compaq and how their early PCs were over-engineered.

The floppy drives of early Compaq PCs were rated/tested for a really high number of insertions/ejections. You'd have to be doing nothing BUT inserting/ejecting floppies 24/7 to even get close to the rated limit.

Some beancounter at Compaq realizes they're overpaying. They lower the rated limit of insertions/ejections by a couple orders of magnitude and let the savings flow through to the profit line with the customer none the wiser. Didn't help against Dell and the other cheaper PC manufacturers though.

[systems_glitch]

Yeah, add on top of that you usually got full schematics, and logic tables if there were programmable logic devices! That's how we're able to continue offering service on these systems.

There's a pretty good hobbyist community around S-100, a fair number of folks are designing hobbyist-level new boards and such. A lot of that is centered around the following site:

s100computers.com

Some of their designs are...weird...and often "that's not a bug, we like it like that" is what you'll get for pointing out actual design issues...but! it's still cool to see people hacking on it.

[shrubble]

The s100computers Google Group is pretty active and there are new designs for boards that have compact flash etc.

As far as production use? Not sure since the S100 bus is less compact and more expensive than many newer designs.

[virgulino]

All generations of the MSX home computer were based on the Z80. Until the last one, the MSX Turbo-R, when ASCII Corporation designed the R800, a CPU derived from the Z800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R800