From uchinews!att-out!pacbell.com!decwrl!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!bogus.sura.net!jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu!fmsrl7!lynx.unm.edu!mimbres.cs.unm.edu!bbx!bbxrbk!russ Sun Mar 7 13:45:32 CST 1993 Article: 35659 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!att-out!pacbell.com!decwrl!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!bogus.sura.net!jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu!fmsrl7!lynx.unm.edu!mimbres.cs.unm.edu!bbx!bbxrbk!russ From: russ@bbxrbk (Russ Kepler) Subject: Re: MITS Altair 8800? Message-ID: <1993Mar7.005542.2382@bbxrbk> Keywords: MITS, Altair, 8800, 8080 Organization: russ at home in Albuquerque New Mexico References: <1993Mar5.050056.24468@d-and-d.com> Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 00:55:42 GMT Lines: 60 Status: R In article <1993Mar5.050056.24468@d-and-d.com> dnichols@d-and-d.com (DoN. Nichols) writes: >In article sjm1@crux2.cit.cornell.edu (Iceland Boy!) writes: >>floating around out there? Or, for that matter, have any of you BUILT an >>Altair, seen one, or used one? I'd love to see your stories. > > Well... yes, I did build and use a MITS Altair, (still have it, >BTW), but it was the second one that they came out with, the 680b, rather >than the 8800. As far as I can tell, there weren't many of the 680b's >made. I learned a lot from that little machine (its name is Blinky, and it >sits on a high shelf today.) [entering OldPhart mode...] I used to work next door to MITS here in Albuquerque. Their shot was on the SE corner of the state fairgrounds, and I did occasional work next door (there were inexpensive semi-storefront places) at an electronics repair shop named D&B Electronics. One of the owners of D&B was one of the advisors for a Boy Scout Explorer post I'd belonged to, so I came in once in a while to work on my own and other stuff. I'd gotten pretty good on one thing the shop serviced: Sun Auto Diagnostic gear. MITS wasn't doing too well - there'd been another of the military spending cutbacks, and that was the mainstay of their telemetry business (I think their name was Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems). The owner was pretty much on the ropes, and a lot of the engineers we'd had over for beers and chats were gone. I can't recall the owner, but I do recall several conversations with engineers while they were designing the 8008 board, later designed to the 8080 CPU instead. I never saw the article in Popular Electronics, but I saw the result. People would camp on their doorstep in the hopes of getting one of the few kits that they were producing. I recall that they expected to sell a couple hundred or so the first year, and got cash orders for 600+ the first month. MITS major mistake was to promise to make a kit work. The shit that came back from folks that couldn't operate a soldering iron was simply incredible - you'd have to resolder the whole board to get a start on figuring out what they'd cooked with their 120W sheet metal soldering iron. Engineers from MITS used to delight in coming over to D&B to show the latest disaster and get a cold one... A little while after MITS started producing hardware I went to college and didn't really see any of the MITS folks - otherwise I might have some more of the rise & fall stories. I never worked on any of the first or second generation ALTAIR machines (other than helping to diagnose an occasional fault for a friend. I did work on the OS for the successor to MITS - Pertec. Pertec bought MITS and made it come out with the replacement to the ALTAIR - the PCC 2000. It then started rotating management in and out of MITS to the point that there was no member of management that had clue one what MITS did or was doing. After that the product never really had a chance. -- Russ Kepler, posting from home russ@bbxrbk.basis.com,bbxrbk!russ@bbx.basis.com "Sale of this posting without attached front cover may be unauthorized" From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!olivea!koriel!male.EBay.Sun.COM!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!brinkley.East.Sun.COM!walters.East.Sun.COM!harpoon!gsteckel Mon Jul 25 15:21:01 CDT 1994 Article: 72256 of alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!olivea!koriel!male.EBay.Sun.COM!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!brinkley.East.Sun.COM!walters.East.Sun.COM!harpoon!gsteckel From: gsteckel@harpoon.East.Sun.COM (Geoff Steckel - Sun BOS Hardware CONTRACTOR) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Did Bill Gates write Microsoft Basic ? Date: 22 Jul 1994 15:24:04 GMT Organization: Omnivore Technology, Newton, MA (617) 332-9252 Lines: 27 Message-ID: <30ooak$6mb@walters.East.Sun.COM> References: <30e9rs$2fo@pluto.njcc.com> <1994Jul22.054151.109638@ua1ix.ua.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: harpoon.east.sun.com Status: R In article <1994Jul22.054151.109638@ua1ix.ua.edu> jrobert1@ua1ix.ua.edu (Jeff Robertson) writes: >Ian Kemmish (iank@tdc.dircon.co.uk) wrote: >> khansen@pluto.njcc.com (Ken Hansen) writes: > >> (That's What Simulators Are For) > >But what type of machine was the simulator on ? I saw a listing for Basic while Gates & his team were writing it on the PDP-10 at Harvard. The -10 was owned by the US Govt, and _everyone_ using it had to sign a statement agreeing that any commercial work on that machine was forbidden. Upon being informed that what they were doing was forbidden, a team member replied (approximately, language cleaned up), "Get lost". This wonderful mode of doing business has always been a Micro$oft feature. >> >flew to New Mexico and loaded it up and it ran (walked???) on the first This perhaps explains the call to Albequerque on my office phone at Harvard about that time. -- geoff steckel (gwes%om3@trilobyte.com) Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Sun Microsystems, despite the From: line. This posting is entirely the author's responsibility. From jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu Thu Jun 15 12:26:42 CDT 1995 Article: 105160 of alt.folklore.computers Xref: uchinews alt.folklore.computers:105160 comp.os.cpm:9619 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!news.uiowa.edu!news From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: MITS (Altair) 20-year reunion Date: 15 Jun 1995 15:36:11 GMT Organization: University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Lines: 55 Distribution: world Message-ID: <3rpk1b$7r3@nexus.uiowa.edu> References: <15JUN199507364127@almach.caltech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu Status: R >From article <15JUN199507364127@almach.caltech.edu>, by shoppa@almach.caltech.edu (Timothy D. Shoppa): > The "Business" section of Wednesday LA Times had a good-sized spread > on the 20th reunion of the employees of MITS. > > Even worse, I don't think the article did any justice to the > community of microcomputer hobbyists which, IMHO, the Altair > represents. Dunno. I helped build Altair 8800 serial number 39, (if my memory serves me correctly), and we were no hobbyest group. Number 39 was purchased by the U of Illinois Medical Computing Lab. We needed more memory almost immediately, so we wire-wrapped our own memory board. We also made a quad UART board that way, and two custom parallel interface cards. The machine served us for years, serving as a code converter behind a pair of PLATO IV student terminals (512x512 dot addressible plasma display panel technology). The Altair served as a protocol converter, speaking a sensible ASCII-based protocol to our minicomputer and looking like a pair of nonstandard PLATO uarts to the PLATO terminals (those wonderous monsters wanted 21 bit packets, countin start, stop and parity bits, leaving 18 data bits per packet -- either 3 characters 6 bits each, or 2 screen coordinates 9 bits each. By design, the Plato terminals could handle 60 packets a second, which translates to 180 characters a second, but with our Altair based interface, we found that we could drive them significantly faster -- we used a pair of 2400 baud lines between the Altair and the host minicomputer. The Altair had no problem at all keeping up with 2 bidirectional asynchronous data streams plus two parallel terminal interfaces. As a result of this experience, the Mecical Computing Lab got into S-100 systems in a big way, helping various research groups use them as lab minicomputers. One IMSAI machine, for example, went into a population epidemilolgy study where there were two colonies of 1000 mice where each mouse had to be weighed daily. The machine was interfaced to a scale and a microphone, and we used some crude voice recognition software to speed data gathering. The operator would read the mouse's serial number out loud while bringing the mouse to the scale, then weigh it, then return it to its cubby before getting the next one. Our worst problems there were with escaped mice getting into the cableways. The whole point is, lots of those machines that were nominally made for hobbyests went into non-hobby applications, and this happened from the very start. There were plenty of minicomputer users who'd cut their teeth on PDP-8, PDP-11 or Nova systems who immediately recognized that machines like the Altair 8800 were the obvious next step in low-cost laboratory automation. The IMSAI machine was even better, being built to hardware standards that met industrial expectations. Doug Jones jones@cs.uiowa.edu