A Computer That Changed Everything (Altair 8800)

[video=youtube;6LYRgrqJgDc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LYRgrqJgDc[/video]

Altair 8800 internals:

[video=youtube;NzCB9-Njdsc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzCB9-Njdsc[/video]

I actually built and programmed one.

Programming for real men. No namby-pamby WYSIWYG interface. Command line coding at the register level. That is what hairy chested real programmers do.

LOL! And you had no wimpy punch card reader-it was all line in at real time! Boy- that sucker burned a brick of cash back then! 20 meg hard drive? Heck-I'll never fill one of those up! What-like $300 back then? Ooff! Still hurts to think about.

Ah yes, machine code. I remember those days. I learned that stuff on a bread board computer with a Zilog Z-80 I do believe it was. I never did it professionally- only in school. Makes one appreciate high level languages.

We had an IMSAI 8080 in our office back in the day and used it for freeway traffic analysis.

fyrwrxz said:

LOL! 20 meg hard drive? Heck-I'll never fill one of those up!

Click to expand...

The first peripheral kit I designed was a half height 5.25" EDSI drive that had the awe inspiring capacity of 80MB. Came with a 60MB QIC tape drive to back it up. Sold that beast for close to eight thousand dollars. I have word documents bigger than that now.


My fave:

User: Debug>G800:5
Console: Preparing to format - wait a sec, how big is this thing?
User: 1TB
Console: 1 what?
User 1000 Gigabytes, 1000 Megabytes
Console: I get that, how big is that thing?
User: A trillion bytes
Console: No, I mean how large is it?
User: About the size of a deck of cards
Console: Ok bozo, I'm just an 8 bit utility, take your gigantic pack of playing cards and find someway of dealing with it on your own. Exiting to DOS. 17,592,186,044,416 bytes available.
Console - OK jackass where are you keeping all this RAM?

fyrwrxz said:

LOL! And you had no wimpy punch card reader-it was all line in at real time! Boy- that sucker burned a brick of cash back then! 20 meg hard drive? Heck-I'll never fill one of those up! What-like $300 back then? Ooff! Still hurts to think about.

Click to expand...

$300? Hah! Try like $1,300...

A buddy of mine paid $700 for a used Commodore 10Meg in about 1983.

A guy at my engineering school had one of these, I made the lights go around in a circle. It was lots of fun. Back in the good old days when you had to build a computer if you wanted one... as in soldering it together. Maybe that's why I have such an affinity for kits.

I also remember having to manually deposit the bootloader code in a PDP-11... good times.

I had a IBM PC from 1981.. it would not recognize the 10MB hard card so i traded it for a xt .

RAM was soldered to the board ..

Kenny

I worked at a isp when I was in Jr. high school (1995 ish) and in the front room we had an old computer that looked like a large craftsman tool box. The top drawer was the motherboard, and the remaining three drawers were memory boards. Each memory board was probably 2 sq ft covered in ICs and was a few kb. I remember watching one of our service guys take each ICs out off it's socket, cleaning the pins and putting it back to get it working again. I also had for a while the platter set from one of the first 80 Mb magnetic hard drives, 5 platters each about 16 inches across and 3/16 thick, spaced about 3/8 apart.

Prototype of a rocket tracking light (MITS Product #1)

This prototype of a rocket tracking light was built by Forrest Mims for an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry.
Forrest Mims, Ed Roberts, Bob Zaller and Stan Cagle formed Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to sell this kit to
model rocket hobbyist.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/devices/MITS-Model-Rockets-Tracking-Light/

H_Rocket said:

The first peripheral kit I designed was a half height 5.25" EDSI drive that had the awe inspiring capacity of 80MB. Came with a 60MB QIC tape drive to back it up. Sold that beast for close to eight thousand dollars. I have word documents bigger than that now.


My fave:

User: Debug>G800:5
Console: Preparing to format - wait a sec, how big is this thing?
User: 1TB
Console: 1 what?
User 1000 Gigabytes, 1000 Megabytes
Console: I get that, how big is that thing?
User: A trillion bytes
Console: No, I mean how large is it?
User: About the size of a deck of cards
Console: Ok bozo, I'm just an 8 bit utility, take your gigantic pack of playing cards and find someway of dealing with it on your own. Exiting to DOS. 17,592,186,044,416 bytes available.
Console - OK jackass where are you keeping all this RAM?

Click to expand...

ROTFLMAO! OMG, my nerd is showing!

fyrwrxz said:

LOL! And you had no wimpy punch card reader-it was all line in at real time! Boy- that sucker burned a brick of cash back then! 20 meg hard drive? Heck-I'll never fill one of those up! What-like $300 back then? Ooff! Still hurts to think about.

Click to expand...

I do believe you are missing a zero that hard drive price

The initial price for a Seagate ST-506 was $1,500 for a 5 MB formatted drive or $300/Mbyte and this was several years later after the IBM PC was released.

I have an ST-506 in my box of computer history. Anyone want to trade for it?

H_Rocket said:

I have an ST-506 in my box of computer history. Anyone want to trade for it?

Click to expand...

uh-no. I still have a Mac-in-the-box (the darned thing is bullet proof... still works-good luck finding tractor paper for it!) 3 Amigas and down in the pile is prolly a 386! Remember when 286's had a math co-processor chip? 8 1/2" floppies? I hate computers.......

So you know how bad it hurt to toss my working Model 32 Teletype in the dumpster?

Even though they provide a good living for me, I still think computers were a bad idea.

I feel young talking to you guys.

I still have my first computer I built from a kit I purchased from Popular Electronics magazine. It was a COSMAC Elf with a RCA 1802 microprocessor with a whopping 256 bits, not bytes, of RAM. Programming was done with a hexadecimal keyboard. One mis-key and the program would eat itself alive.

blackbrandt said:

I feel young talking to you guys.

Click to expand...

Take heart all you old guys (like me)... There seems to be an aura forming around us with all the hip 20-Something Millennials. I experienced this on Monday of this week when in a meeting with my Director of Marketing and one of her staff. We were doing some brainstorming around a new user interface for a webstore our company is relaunching and something that happened in the session reminded them of an episode of Silicon Valley (the HBO series: https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley) and they launched off into a spirited discussion of some of the quirky characters and episodes. I casually made the comment, "Sounds like my life in 1999", then they really went crazy trying to get confirmation on the quirkiness. But then it only got worse... Apparently there is also a show that is hot with this subculture of pseudo-geeks called Halt and Catch Fire (on AMC: https://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire; I have seen a few episodes of Silicon Valley, but have never seen Halt and Catch Fire) which is apparently about the computer innovation happening in Texas (Dallas/Austin areas I believe are implied) during the late-70's/early-80's in parallel to what was happening in the Bay Area, Apple, et. al. at approximately the same time. Again, I had to admit--"That's me." I remember attending the Dallas-Ft. Worth computer club meetings and sitting in the auditorium as folks shared what they were doing/learning. I remember the weekend morning computer part swap meets in downtown Dallas under the shadow of I-35 (or was that I-30?)--tons of fun for a recent Purdue Engineering grad in his early 20's. Anyway, as the discussion ensued, these women asked more and more questions to verify the tidbits history and categories of inflated stereotypes portrayed. The strange thing, they weren't pandering, they were sincerely interested in these two snapshots of history (early 80's and late 90's) and their impact on the tech they know today. So H_Rocket, fywrxz, old_dude, et. al. you are becoming "Legend" :wink:

Oh, and BTW, first programming for me, as probably most, was done with punch cards on an IBM mainframe at the Indiana University Computer Science department in 1978, circa Professor Douglas Hofstadter (author of Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach). First programming after graduating from Purdue was at Western Electric/AT&T running their Trimline phone production test stations in real-time assembly language on a DEC PDP-8. The ones on the production line were the newer "e" version, but at least one of the platforms we had back in the lab were an older vintage that had a wirewrap backplane to all the I/O.



P.S. Thought I better provide some more info for the young-uns in the audience... The AT&T Trimline phone was one of the largest selling wireline phones in history. The production line for the Trimline phone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimline_telephone) was in the Indianapolis Shadeland Works (on the east side of Indianapolis). The production line was, at the time, the longest contiguous line in the world. We had twenty plus test stations along that line doing testing at all stages of the assembly (not 20 tests, many 100's of tests at twenty physical sites). This testing was all controlled by a pair of redundant PDP-8e computers with sensors out the wazoo. More impressive was that the whole multi-system test configuration was written in a hybrid pollled/interrupt driven assembly language program complete with sub-routine calls, logic branching, and other typical constructs in today's modern languages. Debugging was done through memory dumps and tracing at the HEX level. Another note on the activity of the Indianapolis Bell Labs/Western Electric location--this is where the original AT&T picture phone was developed (about 50 years before it's time).

Tim

We welcome you into the ranks of the Legendary

And remember

Age, experience, and treachery will out perform youth, skill, and enthusiasm -> every time!


I wonder how many folks here realize wire wrap wire can be used for something other than making igniters?

H_Rocket said:

So you know how bad it hurt to toss my working Model 32 Teletype in the dumpster?

Click to expand...

With a heavy piece of iron like that, I'm not surprised. Bend your knees, not your back. :lol:

blackbrandt said:

I feel young talking to you guys.

Click to expand...

BYTE me, Matt!! (LOL- you just ascii'd for that!)

WAC_Hal said:

I still have my first computer I built from a kit I purchased from Popular Electronics magazine. It was a COSMAC Elf with a RCA 1802 microprocessor with a whopping 256 bits, not bytes, of RAM. Programming was done with a hexadecimal keyboard. One mis-key and the program would eat itself alive.

Click to expand...

My first was a COSMAC Microtutor. It was very similar to the Elf, but built in house at RCA labs; my father worked there. My^* Microtutor had 256 bytes of RAM, but no hex keypad; programs were entered a byte at a time by setting a bank of 8 toggle switches then pushing a button marked "IN" to put the byte into RAM. Later I did the same thing with my IMSAI^**, but that had CPM as well.

The Microtutor had virtually the same design as the ELF because they were both designed by Joe Weisbecker, who also designed the processor. Really smart guy. There was another in house machine just called the 180 which was, in a nutshell, a Microtutor with a second main board that included a bunch of extra interface circuits and that hex keypad. The 180 gave birth to both the COSMAC VIP (I still have mine) and the RCA Studio 2 video game console.

* Well, I say "My Microtutor" but it was one Dad brought home from work for a while and eventually it went back. Likewise we had a 180 around for a while before it went back.
** The IMSAI was Dad's too, but we used it together.