http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362186,00.asp
http://tinyurl.com/yjsnx8o
I take this as a landmark in the passing of an era.
I still have the Altair my wife and I built from a kit, and a
Decwriter printer/console. I also still have the Robert Tinney
print, once a Byte Magazine cover, of the guy in a museum diorama
(probably holographic) scratching his head reading a manual sitting
in front of a Decwriter with the Altair to his left. James T kirk and
Spock are in the museum tour crowd behind him looking over his
shoulder. I've often thought of enacting the scene from the museum
diorama for a personal photo.
The original Mits Altair 8800 we built had only 256 bytes (yes bytes
not k) of RAM, and we later upgraded it to 1k. We programmed it in
machine language by toggling in the instructions using a bay of
switches on the front control panel. We added a "tape" card, which
wrote and read programs from an ordinary Radio Shack tape recorder.
Results were displayed in lights in binary. This was the beginning
of my wife's career in computing. Prior she was somewhat anti-
technology anti-computer. Later Basic was available, but we
eventually decided to buy an Ohio Scientific Challenger computer
instead of upgrading. Both companies were soon defunct. We moved on
to Apple.
That was an exciting time in computing, just as this is an exciting
time in energy transformation.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
