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Dell finds "Oldest PC"
Alowishus writes "Dell's contest to find the oldest PC still in use has found a winner. It's a MITS Altair 8800b, being used by a lawyer, who has had it for 22 years. Dell's submitting it to a museum and giving the lawyer a bunch of modern hardware. "
I wonder what kind of programs are on there
Well, there was a version of BASIC written by billg; they were Microsoft's first big customer, afaik. Check out the Virtual Altair Museum.
How do you think he proved it? I want to believe the guy, but I can't figure out how you make a machine with 256bytes of memory churns out wills and other documents.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
In 1996, here at Oxford Brookes University, the Computer Services Helpdesk got a weird call.
Nobody recognised the error message (BDOS error on A:) but eventually they got the user to describe her machine: dark green, with an integral 3" disk drive. The manufacturer's logo said Amstrad. At this point they passed the call over to me.
When I had recovered sufficiently (I swear the whole of St Elmo's Fire passed before my eyes) I established that:
The user had received the computer in 1986 - it cost about 400 British pounds at the time.
She had undergone three hours training at that time.
She had done useful word processing in Protext on CP/M for ten years.
After ten years she had had her first ever error message, and correctly called the helpdesk. Who eventually referred her to someone old and sad enough to be able to help her, i.e. me.
I found this whole episode very encouraging, though it put my head in a serious 80's timewarp for a while...
george
In the old days, people didn't care that much about things like fonts on documents. You actually sent a pretty straghtforward text stream to the printer.
Printers worked by striking against an inked ribbon which ran over the paper. In some cases, this was done with eight wire pins which would make a vertical array of dots (in which case the font was usually fixed, although later some printers began to store fonts in ROM). The popular office solution was to use a "daisy wheel" printer, which had a round plastic contraption called a font wheel which had a series of fingers with backwards impressions of letters and numbers on them. To produce an "A", the printer would rotate the wheel so that finger with an impression of an "A" was over the ribbon and fire a solenoid to strike the ribbon against the page. To change fonts, you changed wheels.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is a bit before my time(born in '78, saw my first computer in '82) but it seems that Microsoft's strategy really has been quite consistant over the years.
"Drats, foiled again!" -Bill Gates
2KB -> 16KB? Must have been a ZX81/TimexSinclair 1000.
Still have mine somewhere - even found the 16KB addon at a sidewalk sale in 1988!
You're pretty optimistic that the Dell would hold its value for that long!!!
Gee...I upgraded my machine to 128MB...not cause I couldn't get something done - but because I could and it would make things better.
So
Yeppp...need that 128MB so they can fit all the easter eggs and other useless features in there.
Oh...don't worry about that bug that'll affect everyone that uses the computer...it'll be fixed (or replaced by another bug) in the next release
Oh yes - fired up DU, the well-known disk sector editor for CP/M, and cudgelled the disk into behaving itself.
The cause - I suppose most floppies' sector marks begin to fade 10 years after formatting.
george
"Disk Editor? We hand-wrote bits to the disk with a magnet!"
You could get 64K into (or rather, bolted onto the back of) a ZX81. 64K RAM packs weren't all that common, though, since the ZX Spectrum had come out by then and the ZX81 disappeared rather quickly after that.
"Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Solow's Paradox == Productivity Paradox - maybe?
Altavista turns up zilch on "Solow's Paradox", so where's a definition/history of Solow's Paradox...
Your point is valid, but it all boils down to one thing. Is it cheaper to increase hardware speed and decrease software speed, or to let up on hardware research and blast money into better code? And do consumers stop buying slower software (that may have more features, pointless ones or not) when they have access to faster hardware to run it? No, they buy faster hardware and then buy the slower software. Clean tight code throughout the software industry would be wonderful, but unfortunately it makes no economic sense.
In OSS software, we see a shift in ideals, and the ability of linux to run on older hardware is a representation of that. However, it still must remain portable, thus tending to using a higher level language, thus increased size/decreased speed (this is general, not a hard and fast rule). So OSS tends to value the latter more, but it also values clean code (or at least not bloatware), and both of those are valued above the "Let's just rely on faster hardware to pick up the slack" mentality.
Derek
The FAA is still the largest purchaser of vacuum tubes in the US. Guess why? Dinosaur computing hardware. A 22 year old Altair is nothing. 22 years is just 1977. Heck, I still run my Atari 2600 from those days. Is it worthy of being in a museum? Hardly.
I believe that Apple coined the term, "Personal Computer," in the Apple ][ days. (It sounds Jobsian, doesn't it?) Of course they never trademarked it. When IBM came out with the "PC" they co-opted the term.
They were pretty hefty, too. About like a big-ass piece of stereo equipment from the same era.
But I'm wondering if this is for real. How was the guy doing wills and legal documents on this thing? Didn't the Altair just have toggle switches and LEDs on the front panel? Did he have one of those teletype arrangements so the thing had a keyboard?
Somebody should upgrade this guy to a VIC-20...
Going from the Altair to the latest 'n greatest...what will happen to his productivity?
btw, the Altair was not even close to being the first personal computer.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
You are one stupid asshole ( also known as mattc) And if you don't change your behaviour , next time it will be much worse ...
Sloppy, are you still fucking your own sister ?
You can see it here on Ebay. The guy hasn't had any bids yet, btw.
J.
there is a cross section of that tree in the boston museum of science on display, its neat, it shows historical events on the rings of the tree
check it out if you can
ARM THE WHALES
that's ok, it won't take long to write down all 256 bytes... even in binary!
It did have drives. ZDNet has a version of the story with a little more information.
From ZDNet:
"But then he began adding peripherals: a 9-inch monitor and a keyboard for $550, a digital tape drive for $428, a printer for $3,100, and a floppy-disk drive for $900."
Yeah the real kicker is, the guy was still *using* the computer to write wills and whatnot. Now he gets $15,000 in a new server, desktop (I believe) and a laptop. Maybe more stufff, can't remember. Pretty nice..
Congratulations!!!
Do you just sit there at your Altair's keyboard(?) and reload the page, over and over?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Do you have pics of the PET? I am interested in picking one up. Email me - geologist AT hotmail DOT com.
--Shane
-=Knowledge of software commands does not mean mastery of concepts=-
Regards, Ralph.
Ya know, I bet Linux would run on that..
Core Memory -
A type of memory used in computers (mostly during the mid-late 50's-late 70's, though the later half could be wrong - still used in nuclear warhead carrying missles due to resitance to EMP effects), that consisted of small, donut shaped, ferrite "cores", arranged in a grid pattern by a grid of cris-crossing wires, with one core at each intersection of the grid of wires (think of a screen from a screen door, and where the wires overlap, there would be a core at a diagonal with the wires threaded through). A third wire (called the "sense" wire) is threaded through all of the cores in a the following manner; starting from a corner, and advancing down the diagonal. Each core of the plane represents one bit of memory. These planes were generally stacked into a cubical type structure (some, like on an IBM 360, were the size of a modern refridgerator, and held quite a chunk - 64K or so). In the beginning, a plane could be built/threaded by hand, but as time went by, the size of a plane shrank, and became VERY tiny...
Operation of a core plane is as follows:
Assuming all cores are "cleared":
To write a bit:
The bit is selected applying half the voltage needed to flip the polarity of the ferrite core on one of each of the grid wires - so for bit 1, half the voltage would be placed on the first X grid wire, and half on the first Y grid wire. The total voltage at the junction would exceed the amount needed to change the polarity of the core, thus writing the bit. Positive voltages applied would flip the bit one way, negative the opposite, thus enabling the two states of the bit.
To read a bit:
In this operation, the action of reading a bit effective XORs the bit. It is done by reading state of the bit through the sense wire, while applying either positive or negative half-voltages again via the X and Y selection wire process. If the bit flips, the sense wire will "pulse" in the direction of the bit - so if positive voltages are assumed equal to a bit value of 1, then a positive pulse on the sense wire means that the bit was set. Unfortunately, this process reverses the state of the bit, and the bit must be re-written after being read.
Ok, I think I got most of that right - I know I am not completely correct - if you want something better, consult a good computer history book. All I know is that core memory was developed in the search for a fast, rewritable, cheap, and easy to manufacture memory system - mercury delay lines and magnetic drum memory (precursor to today's hard drives) just weren't cutting it at the time.
OK - where are my extra points?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I bet he will be begging to get his old Altair back after he sees Windows 98!!!!
The PET2001 aka CBM2008/3008 was build first in 1977, with a black and white monitor, tape drive and 8k RAM, running Basic1.0. I once had one of those with additional dual-floppy (each 1meg) and two external 64k-Boxes (not that big at all :-)
Later it got a green/black-monitor and basic2.0
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Yup im last, dead end in line. Im too slow! Heh, an Altair computer. On man, do they even have keyboards on those things? Or am i getting two different computers mixed up? Evil Lister
No... I just visited Slashdot, saw that no comments where posted yet, and I rushed through the process as fast as possible.
:)
I'm actually using a $4000 Dell Laptop, and not an Altair
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Articles, Reviews & Resources for Webmasters
Get a bunch of 'em and make a Beowulf cluster. :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Now he will understand all the "beauties" of modern hardware/software like BSOD...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Neither does a single flip-flop, but I still think I'll get more done on a p2 with linux :-)
There is no DELL laptop in existence worth $4000.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
As to trading a working Altair for $15K worth of Dell crap; I wouldn't even think of it. It's easily worth that much on eBay -- and you could buy a bunch of really good stuff for a lot less and pocket the change.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
ok so this computer has 256k of ram, dang that's small. How did they fit an operating system into that? Or was the operating system on a chip? I must imagine that the man was using some other form of storage along with the ram, i mean you couldn't even fit this post into that much ram. Well i guess i'll just stop bitching about my 3.7 gig hard drive being to small now.
I found the timing of this piece entertaining. I had just got done placing an order for a spanking-new 500mHz box to replace my 'ancient' (2.5 years old) P120. And here, I thought I'd been very patient to wait so long!
"Hey...you've got weasels on your face" -- Weird Al
I think he has moved on to his brother and their farm animals
[drawled out] GAWD!!!... The audacity of kids today. I can hear the wind tunnel between the ears. "Whoooooosh!!! How does a whole document fit into 256 bytes of RAM?" Idiot. The document is stored on secondary storage. Paper tape, mag tape, or drum memory. Only the line your editing was in RAM. But then, a modern machine will probably refuse to open a 512 MB text file. "Out of memory" it will say. Now that cheap machines come with 128MB of RAM it's disgusting how programs and OSes start to require nearly that much to even run. Do programmers today even THINK about efficiency and tightening their code? "Oh, the compiler does that optowhatzit thing" Feh! About as well as shit. Or do they just figure throwing more hardware at their horrific bloatware will make it all seem to run better. I actually heard computer salesmen saying that "you need at least a pentium to get on the internet". Damn! Fuck! My old Heathkit terminal plugged into a (modern) 33.6K modem STILL screams today and doesn't take 5 minutes to start up. The only REAL programmers in the workforce today are the ones writing code for the various microcontrollers (PICs, etc.) Everyone else is just a cut and paste cookie cutter suffocating under the weight of his own code.
So, after doing its job faithfully for 22 years, they take this man's computer away, and give him something new, which will no doubt be running Windows. That's like finding the oldest living tree, and cutting it down to put in a museum.
Also, the article says that the computer has 256 bytes of RAM. That seems unlikely, but perhaps it has 256kB.
doesn't diserve a computer.
it's a shame how people (mis)use modern technology.
computers like that didn't need an OS, you bootstrapped the thing usually from an 80-column paper tape. go read Knuth's books (The Art of Computer Programming in this case) and play with MIXAL, it's fun.
Build yourself a Dell Inspiron system with 384MB of RAM, a 15" screen, a 14 GIG HDD, add some accessories and it's more than that. Think before you write.
My old C=128D had a label on it.. Personal Computer. :-)
If I remember correctly, Cringley (of "I, Cringely" fame) has in his possession an Altair - but not just any Altair - Altair serial# 2... anybody who has seen "Triumph of the Nerds" should remember that... it's a great show. Anyways, I'm jealous of that lawyer!
Really? Where were Apple's unfed, ferral, rabid attack lawyers?
Must have been before Apple bred them. (Did they breed them just in time to sic them on Franklin?)
Either that or even those vicious monsters were afraid of IBM...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Why, because mattc speaks the truth ? Face it, Win98 is a toy.
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money
...
Serious money == $2500. A little short of what he got in return, I'd say
he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
Presumably the folks at the computer museum will take care of that.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The first personal computer link was a real good read. I Gotta get one of those 1966 kitchen computers with the built in cutting board.
PC stands for Personal Computer you hapless techno-weenie. I used an original IBM PC all the way until 1993. It was one of the ones with a B stamped on the back, so it was a little bit souped up in terms of on-motherboard RAM (what, 256KB I think, the rest of the 640K was on a sixpack serial/parallel/memory/clock/joystick card). It had an upgraded BIOS chip, from 1984 I think so it could use a hard drive. Mine had a Seagate 20MB drive. I replaced the Intel chip with some third party chip someone gave me, and it had a 8087 math coprocessor. Unfortunately the cassette port went when I had to replace an ISA slot that melted because of my (8-bit) sound blaster for some reason. But the point (yes there is one) is that on the front there was an elegant little metal square that said IBM Personal Computer
-Barry
This is my sig...or something
Pray that the inventor of this technology never gets as far as innovating to the stage of making this thing talk using any advanced technology such as audio.
Well, long before there was a paperclip in Office, there was the Paperclip Computer ....
Click on PC milestones & search
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It wasn't the first 8800, it was a slightly improved model available later. This one could be upgraded as far as 64K memory.
...
Altair 8800b Photo and Specs
There's also links to a whole bunch of other neat-o Altair stuff, like full-color images of some of the print ads (Napoleon?!), chronology of the various models, accessory prices
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
This man needs a talking paperclip to guide him.
Ahhh! The memmories!!!
I will bet your hardware that all of the stuff they gave this guy will end up in his kids hands. Why? You think he will take the time to learn the new programs? No! Of course not. I have seen it again and again. Once had to get a Lawyer up to an isp. He had spanking new machine - used word star out of a dos-box. Worked at an web design firm - the accountant ran his old dos accounting program from dos - it would not print from under windows. Work here at a math department in a university - you can tell down to the year which faculty member was highered. They still use the programs that were newly installed and shown to them by the sys-admin at the time they came. ( Support is a nightmare - they have everything from dos through nt, and linux on the novell network ).
These people do not want to take the time and effort to learn new technology as it becomes available. If your tool works use it.
Yeah, now programs engage in memory strip-mining and slash-and-burn memory management. Are we moving in the right direction here? I remember using undocumented op-codes on 6502s to squeeze a few extra bytes out of my program. (e.g., one opcode would do a load immediate into both the A and X registers, thus saving two bytes of codespace by not having to do LDA #$FF and LDX #$FF)
I hope Mel is dead. I don't think his kind could survive in a computing world of plenty.
The Altair (I have one) has a series of switches on the front that can be used to toggle data and addresses into memory.
Once the sequence is toggled in, the PC (program counter) is set to execute the instructions, which normally loaded the first sector of the disk drive into ram. This usually loaded in the first track, which has a secondary loader on it, and *this* loaded in the OS, usually CP/M 2.2
The later models cam with a more advanced disk controller that had an EPROM built into them, obviating this chore. Mine has the eprom.
If you needed a keyboard and display, you went out and bought yourself an ADM, ADDS, Wyse or other terminal and hooked it to a serial port, and hoped like hell the ADM3A emulatin was as good as the manufacturer said, since most all software used ADM3A sequences to control the screen formatting. No tic or terminfo here. Later software, particularly Borland's, had sequences for almost every terminal built in. Some software also let you puch in the control codes so it could save them to disk.
Along with my Altair, I have about 6 S-100 computers, including one Compuro running CP/M 68K on a 10Mhz Motorola MC68000. This was the last non-pc system I bought.
The last upgrade I completed on it was to build a 1MB. DRAM card. I was in the middle of hacking the BIOS for a narddrive when I was finally seduced away from it by PC's. All in storage now.
I am currently writing software for a client to replace his ancient Commodore PET system. It must be at least 20 years old.
The PET is still used nearly every day. It is set up to run a single program, which automatically calculates measurements for metal parts, glass, and screens for custom-built house windows, with an integrated "database" of window types. The software was custom-written. By today's standards, it is ugly, user-unfriendly, slow, and clumsy. But back then, it must have been a huge improvement over repetitive number crunching with calculators and pencils.
Any idea what a fully-functional Commodore PET system, with Commodore monitor and a HUGE external floppy drive cabinet (with two 5 1/4 inch drives) might be worth?
Should my client or I try to auction it off?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
A very nice and well thought out web page there. Everyone should check it out.
Of course, the contest was for the earliest "personal computer" still in use...I don't think you could find a lot of people using the computers on that web page.
Although I recognize quite a few of them!
Yeah, but those pesky CTX monitors are much harder to fold up with your laptop than a 15" LCD display panel is. The panel also has the benefit of being made into the laptop, so you don't need an extra power cable.
"Have lunch, or be lunch."
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Let's see now - 256 bytes of memory. 2Mhz 8080. Hmmm. Cranking out wills with this? C'mon. You could barely make a glass teletype out of that configuration. But we're asked to believe he was doing serious legal work with it? I worked with the first 8080 and the 1702 EPROMS which each held 256 bytes. I coded for it on a teletype. This read is marketing malarkey.
This reminds me of a time I was in San Fransisco, in an Apple Store. This woman came in while I was looking at software, and when asked if she needed help, insisted on buying a computer that would still be working in 20 years time.
The assistant tried and tried to explain to her that it would be hideousl slow, and there would be no software, but at the end of every sentence, the inevitable reply would come in that southern drawl.. "I just want a computer that'll work in 20 years time.."
*scream*
--- Apparently I have an old
That's like finding the oldest living tree, and cutting it down to put in a museum.
That's already happened (sort of).
From Alamut:
Prometheus
In 1964, a graduate student cut down the oldest living tree, a bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva, Pinus aristata) in order to count its rings:
"Late in the year of 1964 a young geographer, Donald R. Currey, a student at this university, who was working toward his doctorate, was in the Southwest searching for evidence of Ice Age glaciers. The Wheeler Peak glacier and related phenomena attracted him. When this student and his associate came upon the bristlecones at the timberline, they began to take core samples from several trees, discovering one to be over 4,000 years old! Needless to say they were excited, and at some point, their only coring tool broke. The end of the field season was nearing. They asked for (and I still can't believe it!) were granted permission by the U.S. Forest Service to cut the tree down. The tree was 'Prometheus'.
"After cutting the trunk at a convenient level, which happened to be more than eight feet above the original base, 4,844 rings were counted. This student had just killed the oldest living thing on earth! Eventually, dendrochronologists determined the tree to be 4,950 years of age."
For some reason, Prof. Donald R. Currey's home page at the University of Utah doesn't mention the accomplishment
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
Wow, they could really do magic with limited resources in the good ole days!!
So he was using a 22 year-old computer to do his day-to-day work, now he gets a server, a desktop, and a laptop??? What the hell? He obviously doesn't need all of that. But you know what? I DO! My mom is pretty old, I'll give her to a museum for $15,000 dollars worth of computer love. Just send those computers to...
Ben Garrison, a mindless idiot who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
The senior partner at my mother's firm boasts that he never plugs his laptop into the mains "because that's how you get viruses".
The sad thing is these people end up as judges and then sit through computer crime and intellectual property cases...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
He'll be begging for his Altair back within a week.
I can see the fnords!
Hmm... I think maybe the slash scripts should be modified to automatically include a -1 scored first post by AC, so that first posters will always be guaranteed to lose. Maybe then it'll lose its appeal?
No, wait, then there will just be competition for Second Post. The scripts should probably generate a random number (1-3?) of fake First Post attempts.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I bet his productivity drops like a rock.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They packed the Altair in styrofoam and bubble-wrap and gingerly loaded it onto a Dell truck. The winner smiled as he looked around at his $15,000 in new hardware....
...then ran out of the office after the truck, screaming, "Wait! I've still got to get my data off that thing! WAIT!"
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Look all he needs someone to do his show him how to double click the little icon for whatever word processor he's going to use. Then he will type whatever he needs and have someone show him how to print it. I doubt he'll save whatever it was to disk.
He may have trouble putting new paper and ink in the printer but thats not really a software problem.
-- Rambar
This holier-than-thou attitude of companies like Dell really cheeses me off. So what if some lawyer is using an Altair on a day to day basis. If it's served it's purpose for 22 years, it's quite clearly adequate for the job. What makes Dell think that a modern piece of hardware is going to fare any better? Further, putting the beast into a museum is just insulting. (I must stress that although this sounds like troll-bait, I am genuinly disturbed by the self-importance displayed by modern PC companies.) --- No More! The crap rolls out your mouth again. (Metallica)
Just what every company needs, a customer that buys a new system every 25 years.
Guess they can write him off from buying anything new. Wonder if he got a printer with the deal.
And, you'll get a kick-ass beowulf cluster out of these babies...
--
I'm still puzzling over how this guy could be churning out wills, etc. on this thing.. sheesh!
It shoomed on over my head...
Insert mind here.
You can't run Wordstar on one of those! Have you ever seen an Altair 8800b? If it's anything more primitive out there it would have to be an Imsai (used in War Games if I'm not mistaken). My old Nascom-II from about the same time was almost advanced compared to it (2KB RAM, yay!). Running Wordstar on it would be like running Word on your pocket calculator. TA
didn't HP call it's reprogamable caluclators that it made in the late sixties to early seventies a Personal Computer?
am I right, or just mistaken?
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
Is there an Altair emulator for Windows? Dell should just install that on his new desktop PC.
Great story, but you forgot to tell how it ended.. did you find what caused the BDOS error on A:?
TA
Maybe its time for the 256 byte operating competition - or is this taking the idea of micro-kernels a bit too far! I would be surprised if any of the current operating systems could even fit one part of a micro-kernel in to the 32 kb of my BBC Micro computer (still my favourite computer). What could an IBM-compatible PC [usefully] do in 256 bytes... (it would take a very efficient character set to get this message into under 256 bytes!)
The C-128D wasn't exactly a predecessor to the IBM PC, though. The C64, however, was, and although the system didn't say "personal computer" on it, I am fairly certain that the box it came in did.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Uh no, Linux is a toy.
What kind of drives does this thing have? Those 9 inch super-floppy disks? Or maybe a tape drive? Anyone want to enligten me on this one? =] I wonder what kind of programs are on there, and how long they took to boot. What about the size? Anyone know how big and how much this product weighs? I'm sure they didn't have even MFM/RLL drives back then, so I don't suppose it had any form of a hard drive?
Yes, Robert X Cringely found the Altair 8800 serial #2 in the early '90s and filmed it for his documentary. (serial #1 was lost in the mail)
Way to go, Dell.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money, and will only continue increasing in value as a collectors item. Never mind getting his data off that machine, he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No! I mean Yes! I mean No! I mean ... damn it, was this a trick question?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Actually, the Altair had audio built-in.
(Scroll down a bit)
I bet they set him all up on windows, wait until his first crash. =) "what the hell did you guys give me? I want my alt8 back!"
I have one of the first Sinclair ZX80s with 1KB or 1024 bytes of RAM. With that small amount of memory, I could solve 5X5 simultaneous equations, AND display them on the screen! The display used a variable amount of RAM depending on how long each line was... An empty screen used 24 bytes, and each line could take up to 32 bytes. Anyway, I eventually upgraded to 16KB of RAM, but I think the upper limit of the Z80 (or 8080) was 64KB unless you did some weird page swapping. I doubt if the Altair had 256KB of RAM.
I inquired directly to the contest people about what type of computers are considered "PCs", and I was told in no uncertain terms that it was only for computers of the x86 kind. Any other type of computer, be it apples, pdp11s, commodores, etc were out of the running. Now they pick an altair! Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, I wish they'd stick to their statements.
If this Altair has a copy of Bill's (well, probably Paul Allen's ... its not as if Bill can code is way out of a paper bag) original BASIC interpreter, Mr. Gates should certainly take legal action, as it is "his" code, and not all those meddling, communistic, thieving hobbiests'.
'Nuff said.
nt
How about -1 on comments with "First Post" in the topic? :)
Amiga - Back for the future!
I think it's rather insulting to call an Altair a "PC". That abmomidable acronym didn't come into common use until the introduction of the IBM PC. And, for the most part, is still refers to the decendents of the IBM PC, and not to other small computers.
Old working personal computer, yes. Oldest working microcomputer, probably. Oldest PC, no.