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That's a bit like asking what did carpenters did with hammers and hand-saws in this age of CAD/CAM. :) I assure you the Altairs were quite useful. Mostly, owne
by jackhack 8y ago
That's a bit like asking what did carpenters did with hammers and hand-saws in this age of CAD/CAM. :)
I assure you the Altairs were quite useful. Mostly, owners enjoyed the luxury of working on their very own computer, rather than a time-share machine's account from the corporation or university.
It's difficult to communicate how this felt, in this age of ubiquitous computing. A machine that one could reboot whenever you wanted. Tinker. Explore. They wrote games. Controlled hardware. Learned what made a computer tick. Connect a modem and talk to others. Sure, it was primitive, but at the time it felt as cutting-edge as space travel.
If I recall correctly, the Altair ran CP/M, and could run the early Zork infocom text adventure series.
- mywittyname 8y agoI guess the basic model was so lacking in features that I found it hard to understand how people would make use of it. So it's more like asking how people actually used old steam cars after watching a video of Jay Leno spending hours prepping his and learning they could only drive 15 miles between fill-ups. I did some research after posting that and realized that you could get teletype terminals for them. This makes it much easier to see what people did. I originally thought that most people punched op-codes into that front panel, which seems like an awful lot of work for not much reward.
- unimpressive 8y agoVideo of someone loading BASIC with a teletype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk