🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 2 Apr 2018 13:49:04 -0700 (PDT), hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

>On Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 8:49:09 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
>
>> Altair was mid '70s.  It was the first attempt at a personal computer
>> that (a) was actually affordable, (b) was actually potentially useful,
>> and (c) got any press attention.  Just about everybody with an
>> interest in computers knew about it.
>
>Would you know what kind of applications people ran on it?  The 
>following article is very interesting, but does not talk about 
>applications:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
>
>It appears that to do anything beyond hobbyist work, a person needed
>to purchase additional memory, interface boards, and a Teletype to
>provide I/O (entering programs by switches was very tedious).  It
>would seem the price of a 'complete' system would be about $3,000-4,000
>in today's dollars, about two year's worth of time-sharing service.

The Altair was an S-100 machine.  It could be made to do just about
anything that was within the capabilities of the 8080.  How much it
cost to trick it out depended on how much sweat equity you were
willing to put in and how good a scrounger you were.  Getting it fully
configured to where it was a reasonable alternative to a PDP-11 could
cost a bit if you were buying all the parts preassembled, but it would
still be a lot less than DEC would ask for a similar configuration in
the PDP-11.

As for applications, CP/M was available very early and from there a
wide range of applications became available.