2026-04-22 10:53 UTC
@fae @lynn
The S-100 bus power supplies were nominally +8V, +16V, and -16V, filtered but unregulated. Each card was expected to have linear voltage regulators from +8V to +5V, and, if needed, ±16V to ±12V.
The more cards in your system, the more amps of each supply you needed, though the "1400 amps" in the song is gross exaggeration.
Early Altair 8800 systems, and some others, had small backplanes with few slots, and were provided with wimpy power supplies.
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Replies (1)
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@brouhaha@mastodon.social 2026-04-22 10:56
@fae @lynn The most common configuration IMSAI 8080 provided 22 slots and a beefy power supply, which resulted in MITS and other S-100 vendors having to offer similar configurations. If you really did fill up a 22-slot backplane (e.g., with CPU, a few I/O cards, and sixteen 4K RAM.cards), you really needed a lot of amps. I'm sure that large S-100 system configurations were the inspiration for the song. 2/