I don't know how many HN folk are familiar with the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switches to enter data.
The basic machine didn't even have a boot ROM, or an operating system, so you would enter your boot code one byte at a time by using those toggle switches. A common add-on device to boot from would be a paper tape reader - e.g. with Microsoft BASIC on it.
>the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switches to enter data
just to be clear, at the very same time in history, the PDP-10 was a very large computer and cost orders of magnitude more, and pretty much looked the same
You could easily automatically boot either of these computers (without having to enter the code through switches) by putting a ROM at bootup address that had the same code in it. That's still how computers work today.
They only gave you the switches because it wasn't established yet that everybody would want to put the same code in.
the amazing thing about the Altair 8800 (intel 8080) was that simply, for the first time, you could have these same blinken lights at home and do all the mittengrabbin and gefingerpokin you want to https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/blinkenlights.htm...
within a very short time (same timeframe) the SWTPC 6800 (motorola 6800) came out and it chose not to have the lights and switches, it booted into a little debugger which was simplistic but would let you accomplish the same thing of entering in the code you really wanted. It required a terminal though, which raised the cost of entry. https://deramp.com/swtpc.html
The only reason we don't get the lights and switches any more is that they think we don't want them. But you and I know we do, so upvote this comment to record shattering levels and I'll share it with Apple and Dell and we'll get our real computing platform back again! Also, post your code for a good adblocker we can enter through the front panel.
I'd guess people will look back at wearable AI devices the same we look back on wristwatch TVs and calculators. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I'm guessing in 50 years we'll still only be carrying one electronic device around - basically a smartphone.
Yes, in its most basic configuration, it is essentially a microprocessor trainer! The only I/O you had was a set of 8 "sense switches," which were a byte-wide input port, and those were shared with the upper 8 address bits. Someone eventually figured out routines that make use of nonexistent memory in the base configuration to use the upper address lights as a "display," by writing loops that accessed those areas frequently enough to make the LEDs look illuminated due to persistence of vision. That, with the sense switch inputs, was used to put together a "Kill the Bit" game!
There was another "output device" discovered in the basic configuration: RF interference! Someone was listening to an AM radio while hacking on their Altair, and noticed in some parts of the program they'd get a ZIIIIIP! sort of noise out of the radio, when the cover was off. This was hacked on and expanded into a tune-playing program! Naturally, one of the first songs the Altair was taught to "sing" was "Bicycle Built for Two" ("Daisy"). Here's a video of a friend of mine's Altair running the music program:
He'd brought his recently-acquired Altair 8800 over to our house to get it running, since I had a lot of other S-100 stuff going. The terminal to the left of it was running a ROM monitor on a Dajen SCI board, described here:
...after painstakingly toggling in the music program through the front panel, we used the Dajen board to burn the program into a 2708 1K x 8 EPROM so we wouldn't have to do it again!
I saw the Altair 8800 on the cover of BYTE magazine in a newsstand in LA as a child and begged my grandparents for a copy. Reading that magazine changed my life and started my journey into programming.
It's old but along the same lines; more stories of industry pioneers: Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date (1992, 1996).
> He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer."
(This looks like a good article/story that is not found on Wikipedia; just sharing these links for anyone who wants an overview / know what it is about, before diving into the story.)
Wow, the price list at the bottom of that Altair article: $439 for the computer (in kit form), $262 for the 4K word memory board, $124 for the serial teletype board, and $1500 for the teletype terminal. The terminal is twice as much as the rest put together!
Furthermore, the Teletype was also your storage device, if you bought the Model 33 ASR. It had both a paper tape punch and a reader. For $1500 you got not only your hardcopy console terminal, but at the time the most compatible way to load and store programs and data!
As far as any program was concerned the TTY was just a serial port, and it couldn't tell the whether data coming in was from keyboard or paper tape reader.
Yup, that's why they were such useful devices! Even if you were ending up with inefficient storage (punching ASCII vs. binary, or expanded BASIC source vs. tokens), it was built-in.
The package was lost in the mail? Or did he not actually finish the computer on time and this was a dog ate the homework type excuse? Depends on the degree to which he was a hustler I guess.
It's pretty obvious from the accounts of the partners he worked with that he was a straight forward guy who did the opposite of what you suggest. If you read the story, he got a detail wrong, it wasn't due to an immediate bankruptcy of the railway, but a strike that eventually let to the bankruptcy of the railway operator. In any case, the computer did not get to its destination in time. We don't know if it ever got there or not as it had become irrelevant to the story.
Nit: Railway Express Agency was intimately connected with railroad infrastructure, but it was not actually a railway. It was, essentially, FedEx, only using railways for transport instead of their own planes.
Funny story about that. The folks who build the Amiga prototype didn't want to take any chances shipping it to CES, or putting it in checked luggage. So they bought their computer its own seat on the airplane with them:
It's not 150 LBS, even fully kitted out (which wasn't possible at the time!), but it definitely didn't fit in the luggage compartment. The first portable to do that was the Osborne :P
His history shows that he did not compromise his integrity to gain a momentary advantage, so I doubt he'd have succumbed in that instance. He understood those things have a tendency to backfire. It's a different world now. That was towards the end of the era where deals could be done with a handshake.
Important point not really expanded upon in the article: Roger Melen was one of the founders of Cromemco, a very successful microcomputer company that started with S-100 products!
Maybe Roberts and the Altair are becoming obscure to younger people, but in the traditional story of the personal computer neither he nor the Altair were "secret" or obscure. As the article mentions, Microsoft was founded by Gates and Allen to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair.
The basic machine didn't even have a boot ROM, or an operating system, so you would enter your boot code one byte at a time by using those toggle switches. A common add-on device to boot from would be a paper tape reader - e.g. with Microsoft BASIC on it.
Here's a video of someone entering boot code.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zbtNImG2NE