I remember it was featured on a copy of popular mechanics or one of those types of magazines - sometime around 1975.
I have one of the original MITS Altair 8800 kits that I assembled. I think I have still have the receipt. I was at the 1st meeting at Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, CA. The meeting was organized by posting in a column in a magazine (no email back then). The link you have below says the 1st meeting was at Stanford SLAC. That is not true. That came later. Gordon French had a hobby of model steam engines. I wonder what ever happened to him. He went to the meetings at Stanford for a time and then disappeared. Steve Jobs and Steve Waz later joined the club and showed the first apple computer at SLAC. I still remember those 'kids' coming down the isle with their 1st plastic case. The first program on the Altair was a looping program that you had to enter 1 byte at a time on the front panel, something like the boot program on a HP 3000 (for those old enough to remember that stuff). It caused a radio frequency signal that sounded like a song on your radio. I later got a punched tape reader that I still have, so you did not have to enter the boot program 1 byte at a time. I believe I had 1K or 4k (yes, 1 thousand bytes) of memory. I developed a tape driver program for a company named Processor Technology in Berkeley - later moved to Pleasanton, CA that would control a small tape drive to give 'massive' storage. It was back before the macro assemblers. It was written in pure machine language with lots of dirty tricks so it would fit in that memory. I remember digging through the Intel docs to find out how I could jump into the middle of some code to save some memory. I learned a lot from a guy named George Morrow in Berkeley - AKA Morrow's Micro Stuff. I believe that George Morrow coined the name 'S-100' for the first microcomputer bus. Great fun. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Madigan" <mmadi10...@yahoo.com> To: <profox@leafe.com> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 1:59 PM Subject: [NF] Happy 34th Birthday to the Altair 8800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVwfDA4watU&eurl=http://hotair.com/archives/2008/12/19/anniversaries/&feature=player_embedded [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/020f01c9624f$cff41c70$8600a...@w2k3s02 ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
