Altair Basic
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Altair Basic
>Maybe some explaining is in order. The altair was probably one of the
>first real home computers that could be built for a reasonable price
>(something like 400$) it was sort of based on the MITS machine and was
It was made by MITS. It sold for $397
>available in a kit form that people had to build. The firmware had
>microsoft altair basic built into it. The first altairs didnt even have
It never had ROM firmware, but had the option of adding it. Infact it
never came with enough memroy to run basic.
>monitors so you really wouldnt have been able to see 'altair basic' like
>another post mentioned. The altair just had a bunch of lights to show what
It had 2 rows of 8 lights. It also had 8 toggle switches.
was going on inside because VDTs were so expensive. When cheaper VDTs
came out then you could do some real programming without the annoying 'die
blinken lighten' So, the real purpose of this project would be simply to
have a really cool screen with the original (almost) hacker basic on it.
You could use the teletype interface to type and a printer to print out the
results. There were very few with teletype and printer interface built in,
but some people hacked it in. If it were done, you would have to reprogram
it to use the screen and keypad as a teletype terminal.
Grant