Peak Electronics - 68K8-CP Board

This was the only S-100 board Peak Electronics made.

The board was centered around the Motorola 68008 CPU.  This was internally a 16 bit CPU but had an external 8 bit interface. More or less like the 8086 and 8088 CPU's.  It ran CPM-68K or Concurrent-68K

What was interesting feature about the Peak board was how they implemented CP/M-68K.  They presume that you are running CP/M-80 or CP/M-86 and they provide a 68K boot program for each.  There's a small interface program that lets the 68K use the existing BIOS for all of its physical I/O so the setup is effortless.  When you are through with the 68K you just  execute the RETURN program and you are back where you came from.  This is particularly useful if you have your favorite editors, etc. whereas CP/M-68K only comes with ED.

You can get a Godbout 68K board a lot cheaper but you'll have a lot more work to get it going.  It's a full up 68000 so you don't have the 1Mb limit of the 68008 as with this board, but it's not a coprocessor so you will have to interface all of your peripherals again.  The DRI 68K assembler and C compiler are adequate (their C is bulky and slow). However I shudder to think of using them to do a BIOS from scratch.

The board therefore ran as a S-100 bus temporary master. The 68008 ran at either 8 or 10 MHZ. There was 128K of RAM onboard (expandable to 512K). The board had room for up to 8K of EPROMs. It had two onboard serial ports (up to 32K baud) and one parallel port as well as an onboard timer.

I do not have the manual for this board. If you could donate one (or a picture) please let me know.
Dave hardy and Ken Jackson wrote a review of this board in 1985 for Micro Systems Journal (Vol 1,#5, p66). It can be obtained here.

Peak Electronics  S-100 Boards
68K8-CP