Slashdot Mirror

People seem to think personal microcomputing started wtih Jobs, Wozniak and Apple and want to adorn history with misinformation. Yeah, the old Apples were pretty revolutaionary however The Home Brew Computer Club[1] was where it all started. With the Altair 88[0] and many other people besides Jobs and Wozniak.

[0] - http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/inside-the-altair-8800-vintage-computer/1453?seq=15
[1] - http://www.silicon-valley-story.de/sv/pc_homebrew.html

The Altair was a kit, not a complete PC; they mostly selected components that hobbyists could already buy and assemble...and sold them to hobbyists to assemble.

The Apple II (the Apple I was also a kit) was a finished product that regular people could buy. Of course, it beat the Commodore and other early PCs to market by a matter of months, essentially no time at all.

A better counterexample would be the IBM 5100 (complicated by the fact that it cost more than the average house at the time, so it wasn't really personal.) Or possibly the HP 9100A, which would have been the first personal computer except for the fact that they called it a "calculator" for marketing reasons.

People seem to think personal microcomputing started wtih Jobs, Wozniak and Apple and want to adorn history with misinformation. Yeah, the old Apples were pretty revolutaionary however The Home Brew Computer Club[1] was where it all started. With the Altair 88[0] and many other people besides Jobs and Wozniak.

[0] - http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/inside-the-altair-8800-vintage-computer/1453?seq=15
[1] - http://www.silicon-valley-story.de/sv/pc_homebrew.html

Try some amateur radio astronomy, now that you have the fixin`s for your very own radio telescope There`s plenty of suitable resources on the web, e.g.: http://www.signalone.com/radioastronomy/telescope/ http://www.bambi.net/sara.html http://www.nrao.edu/epo/amateur/

http://www.bambi.net/

There really should be a Beer 101 class for geeks everywhere. Here's a start: What Part of Beer Don't You Understand?.

Unfortunately, the Homebrew computer club has little to do with homebrewing beer or even brewing software although beer geeks know the true meaning of Free as in Beer.

The SARA, ARRL or DX zone. You've probably done the google search for "amateur radio telescope"
Given that you have the hardware it would seem you need to find someone who has the skills to design the thing. My guess is that your local ham or astrology club would have people who have the knowledge and desire to help. Do you have a university close by, prehaps they might want to take it on as a grad project. But my first port of call would be SARA.
IMHO this is the sort of question that /. should post, I doubt there will be many posts but who cares. I want thought provoking or interesting questions. In short I want questions that make me go and hunt down some ideas.

Don't know what on Earth happened to the company since then (I think it was the same company anyway) but at the time there was much info on the web site about how it was used to do periodic downloads of results from many very remote automated data collectors, like atmospheric stations and so on. There was something about shipping too. But the data rate was extremely short, and it seemed only useful to communications that could be accomplished with a handful of bytes each signal.

I remember at the time worrying about security, since antennas and signals might draw fire from military on innocent villages etc. There still is hardly any phone infrastructure, and any really good solution (like the phone system in the sky one satellite company built for Thailand) seemed prey to a rapacious telecom ministry. Well that's a few years ago. I think I suggested more research into either a store and forward to satellites, or a line of site ham network using a specialized linux type distribution.

Anyway, I said "Amateur Scientist meteor radio" to Google and Google showed me some very nice links!

Meteorscatter Links--Make More Miles on VHF
A link on this page ( Meteor Burst Communication) mentions the noise floor is limited to the noise emitted by the galaxy, which changes through the day as you scan different parts of it. Cool! It says you really ought to be away from cities and highways to keep the floor as low as possible.

The American Meteor Society Radiometeor Project
(a reprint posted last summer of a 1997 article from the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers)

Hardware

• Teletype ASR-33, teletypewriter very popular as a computer terminal.
• Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover story: MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer.
• Apple II with its color graphics and multiple easy-to-access expansion slots.
• IBM PC and its corporate desktop success providing cheap hardware for all.
• IBM's MicroChannel bus and its failure showed the popularity of open hardware.
• Hayes modem command set allowed modem control without custom device driver.
• VGA graphics. Finally the IBM PC could show reasonable images. Web browsing later became a significant side effect.

Software

• VisiCalc. Killer App. Welcome to "electronic spreadsheets." A reason to buy a computer.

Early Computer Magazines

• People's Computer Company, an organization promoting personal and community computing. A computer newspaper before there were computer publications. Community Memory was an early idea for sharing computer databases at computing storefronts.
• dr. dobb's journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, an early proponent of publishing source code. Evolved into Dr. Dobb's Journal.
• Byte magazine, its huge 50,000 copy beginning and eventually the first computer magazine to appear on general magazine racks.
• Kilobaud magazine, very popular hacker magazine, often with sources (remember programs on vinyl sheets for playback from phonograph player into cassette interfaces?).

Conceptual

• Homebrew Computer Club. Build your own computer if you can't afford a small CDC or PDP to heat your house. I was designing a TTL personal computer until the 8080 appeared; sure was nice to have quad NAND DIPs.
• Xerox PARC center with its influential network and user interface experiments.
• MECC: Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium" spread timeshare computing to all Minnesota school districts, then Apple computers. I worked there in the 1970's. State of MN has since sold it.