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Wow so the cassette tape is essentially doing the same job as a floppy disk or CD-ROM would be doing. What an interesting piece of equipment

Vwry cool! Love the power switch 👍

OMG. There was a version of this game running on the Univac 90/70 mainframe where I started my first job as a trainee COBOL programmer in 1978. Several of us used to spend our lunchtimes trying to get the fastest win! And on the subject of cassette tape loading, you could spot the owners of early 70's/80's micro/mini computers. They all had indentations in their fingers where they used to cross their fingers all the time when trying to load a tape program! 🙂

10 PRINT "NAL S"; 20 PRINT "EX. Y"; 30 PRINT "OU LOVE A"; 40 GOTO 10

The fact the front panwl was OCTAL was a huge turn off to me. I MUCH preferred the IMSAI. Prior to the Altair, i had built a small computer based upon the IBM 360 instruction set because I was an IBM assembly lang. programmer since 1969

The tour focused on the "string test" that was to serve as a demonstration that the magnets and the project itself were on track and feasible. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late; the political die had been cast when the bore of the magnets was increased over a year earlier, significantly increasing the project costs and schedule at the absolute worst political time. It is difficult to say if the project would have survived in any case because of the loss of the Texan President and Speaker of the House. Many of the top engineers and scientists in physics research found themselves unemployed and forced to restart or change careers, a terrible loss for science and our country.

The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU.[2] Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics[3] and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines.[4][5] According to Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s.[6] It was the first commercially successful personal computer.[7] The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.[8][9] The Altair 8800 had no built-in screen or video output, so it would have to be connected to a serial terminal (such as a VT100-compatible terminal) to have any output. To connect it to a terminal a serial interface card had to be installed. Alternatively to using a terminal Altair could be programmed using its front-panel switches.

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This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while.

This is the best video I have seen of what it was like to use an Altair PC. I started using PCs with a Radio Shack TRS 3 in high school, and a COmmodore Vic-20 at home. But I never understood how to efficiently (for the day) use an Altair from just a few years earlier. The Altair was different to me because of the switches which made it look like something from the 1950s to me in the 1980s. NNow I can see how a terminal made it useful. I even had that same Panasonic Cassette recorder. Very cool!

I wonder if there is anything musical you can do with this?

I remember one of my early experiences with a computer was with an Altair or something similar around 1977 or 78. The Star Trek game was still readily available and I played it as late as 1982.

OMG!!! The memories! At my first job as a programmer in 1981, one of our development systems was exactly this machine. 5 MB hard drive plus a 106 KB 5.25" floppy.

Wow, this makes me feel old. I think I'll lie down and take a nap.

It's really similar at IMSAI 8080 :) the PC anteroom

"What's a window?"

Wow, this was the game that got me into programming. I saw it on a commodore Pet, had to have it, bought the PET,got the program, tore it apart until I understood every line of code. Almost 50 years later I am finishing my career as a software engineer who never went to college.

M5?

is BASIC in a ROM?

In 1975 the college I was attending had a particle accelerator. The various counters were interfaced to an Altair 8800. I was NOT a science student so I don't know any more than that. I love watching the registers change when the software is running! I DID play Star Trek but we had to do that on the mainframe. The interface was a teletype and you could type *Star Trek* and hit enter. Then the Tech in the control room would mount the tape and load the program for you.

Imagine having no ROM and toggling-in the bootstrap loader to load BASIC from paper tape, then load Star Trek from more paper tape!

Very cool!

I always assumed the 8800 didn't do anything other have the lights blink ha

Its really nice to see classic computer tech like this that is still working today!

Don't know why CZcams sent me here. 🤔Nice piece of equipment, but it's running in reverse.

great person was he who invented and designed this machine

Please please please discharge the CRT while working on these old machines! There can be some very dangerous voltages held by the CRT! There are plenty of good tutorials on how to do it, and you can never be too safe while doing so!

Awesome 👏

Is an image of that diskette available to download from somewhere?

Super cool -- subscribed!

Great video

Love it!!

This looks Wickid Awesome!! Take That Apple Lisa GiGanTic All In One LOL

So exciting for me to stumble across your video. I desperately wanted a SWTPC 6800 when I was a kid, I started saving up but never quite made it to the $400 mark. I learned about the ADM-3A Lear Siegler later through a local computer club, and only finally got my hands on real computers when I worked for a computer shop in 1980, playing with Commodore Pets, Apple IIs and later the first PCs. Thank you for this clip, at last now, after all these years, it was great to see my heart's desire of so many years ago, in the flesh, so to speak. Yes I do have a number of high powered modern machines now, but I'll never forget the excitement of those early days.

I played that on TTY back in '77.

dir/w

Thank you for posting 🫡

That is mint! I still have my G4 Graphite from 2000 in mint cond.

When I opened the box for my 8800B I got the sinking feeling that there was no way that all these parts could work. But they did. I also had the same feeling for the ADM terminal. Then came the reality that I had no idea what to do with this stuff.

When I was a student at UC Berkeley back in the late 1970’s, my friends and I would go to Evans Hall late at night and play this game with a room full of other students. This was on a PDP 11/70

A coworker of mine recently revealed to me that he was one of the few third-party developers who developed software for the Mac before it was released. They had to use the Lisa as a development machine. His Lisa was originally a Twiggy unit, but Apple shipped them the 3.5" upgrade and he installed it himself.

Wow.

You know, It wouldn't hurt if you actually gave us the link.

Counterfeit everything. The machine is theft.

Anybody remember Creative Computing magazine?

Awesome episode!

Would it be possible to get in contact with you to exchange some software for the machine?

How isn't anyone talking about his mouse pad that is a small rug

I played that Star Trek game in a Radio Shack store on the TRS-80 they had on display there. Was cool to be a kid when all the PCs starting coming out.

Hi Timothy, I'm quite new to the world of the Intel 8080 and Altair 8800. I've came to this video after reading Charles Petzold's "Code second edition". He builds a tapered-down version of the 8080 and describes how this computer used the 8080. I'm wondering how did you manage to get the BASIC interpreter to run on the 8080? Wouldn't you need to toggle the machine instructions into memory by hand(switches)? In other words, how did you get the BASIC interpreter loaded into memory? Thanks