Solid State Music - IO5 Boards The company was clearly an extension of their earlier
IO4 board. Since it was a late
production board by the company it was IEEE-696 compatible.
Unfortunately
the board is quite rare.
The IO5 serial and parallel l/O card provided an extremely
flexible interfacing for an S-100 IEEE696 system. Two serial and 3 parallel
input/output ports supported a wide variety of devices such as:- Terminals Modems Serial and parallel printers Keyboards Card readers
Multiple boards could be used to support systems requiring
a large number of peripherals for a wide variety of multi-user applications:--
Special purpose business applications (word processing,
hotel management, banking terminals, training systems) Real-time control systems (engraving, machine tools,
robotics, energy management) Data collection (quality control, laboratory data
acquisition, communications message switching) Add--in/upgrading of current S-1O0 systems (Northstar,
Dynabyte, Cromemco, Ithaca)
Baud rates were individually selectable from 110 to 19,200
baud. Each serial interface was accessible from the bus as 110 in a status/data
port pair.
Serial interfaces can be set through software for:-
5 to 8 data bits 1 or 2 stop bits parity enable parity even or odd sending a break character control the RTS and DTR
Seven standard signals were provided on an RS-232 connector
for each serial interface:-
A 6821B PIA provided two 8-bit bidirectional parallel I/O
ports. The 26 pin connector, J3, could be two 8-bit I/O ports or one 16-bit I/O
port. Each of the peripheral data lines could be individually programmed as
an input or output. Each of the four control/interrupt lines could be programmed
for one of several control modes. These features allow a high degree of
flexibility:-
Two 8-bit bidirectional I/O ports Two programmable control registers
Two programmable data direction registers Four individually controlled interrupt lines Handshaking Program-controlled interrupt and interrupt disable
capability
An optional cable assembly was available for terminal
printer or modem interfacing.
