Dawn of the Microcomputer: The Altair 8800

twobithistory.org

56 points·janvdberg··6 comments

For another dawn-of-the-computer account, The Digital Computer: Where does it go from here?, by Willis H. Ware of RAND. (1954)

https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P608.html

(I've been on a bit of a RAND archive kick recently.)

That's an interesting discovery. Thanks for the link.

I attended the Stanford Linear Accelerator computer meetup in 1976. A guy had programmed a surplus PDP-1 to play music by entering the code through the dip switches on the front panel. It created various pitch notesby timing loops.

PS This meetup was also called the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club.

When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics came out, I worked for IBM San Jose Research, then on Cottle Road, and lived in a duplex across the pumpkin field just to the west. I jumped in my car and headed out to buy a copy, searching everywhere. Eventually I found a copy at a tobacco/magazine store downtown. The area was called Silicon Valley, but most residents weren't thinking about computers.

I find it interesting how similar the Altair and the PC ended up being, at least conceptually.

Hell, the S100 bus may have been even more successful for a time than the Altair itself...

Much more so! The inventor of the Altair was unhappy when that expansion bus took on a life of its own and became a major industry standard, but by that time he couldn't stop it, and yes, that piece of history rhymed a few years later with the IBM PC. Appropriately, the operating system that ended up being associated with the S-100 bus was CP/M, the precursor of MS-DOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com