Wanted: Altair / S-100 serial comms board w/ documentation

drlegendre . drlegendre at gmail.com
Tue Nov 11 23:10:31 CST 2014


Just taking a stab.. I've run out of options trying to locate docs for the
lone S-100 serial board in my stash, so I think it's time to look for a new
unit. I don't own a logic analyzer, nor have I sufficient experience to
figure out how to put my current board to use in the absence of docs.. so
it goes.

Does anyone have an S-100 (for Altair, in specific) RS-232 / serial
communications board with available documentation? Just looking for
something that can be made to work with a common serial terminal (emulated)
so I can play around with BASIC and so forth. Plan is to use a basic 486 /
Pentium laptop running Linux + Minicom or similar to emulate a VT-whatever
on the Altair's comms port.

(As an aside.. a bit of a mea culpa - I +did+ once own a genuine ITT (I
think it was ITT) tele-tank with a paper tape machine. Picked it up for $15
at a local electronics surplus - AxMan - back in the early 1980s. It didn't
work right.. or at least I had no idea what to do with it. When powered-up,
it would begin to print blank lines over & over, line after line.. just sat
there, running away like crazy doing nothing.

I had not the slightest idea how to deal with it, so I removed the works
from the top of the base, and THREW IT OUT OF MY SECOND-FLOOR BEDROOM
WINDOW. It was so heavy, I didn't want to have to carry it back down. The
base served as an excellent printer stand for several years, and the
not-so-obvious access panel did well to conceal various contraband during
the same period.)


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