Comment by curiousObject | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curiousObject | Hacker News Reader

It was an 8800 emulator I believe, not 8080. (Edit - I’m mistaken - it was for the 8080 CPU)

Then they wrote the BASIC interpreter on the emulator, copied it to punched paper tape and Allen wrote the loader for that while he was on the plane to demo it for Altair.

On the real Altair 8800 hardware which they had never seen, it worked first time (they must have had some advance knowledge of the Altair’s I/O functions)

It was a series of amazing feats

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Edit: maybe this feat was not so famous because the Altair was not sold in numbers like the Apple II, which Steve Wozniak is well known for (25000 Altairs sold vs Apple’s 6 million - plus clones)

As far as I can remember, the Altair used an Intel 8080A processor. The Intel 8008 wasn't widely used by hobbyists. I don't recall any CPU with 8800 designation from that era. Possibly RCA or TI, but neither were used by Altair.

The Motorola 6800 and Mostek 6502 soon became more popular because they were easier to interface than the Intel 8080A. The Zilog Z80 came out a couple of years later.

You’re right. Thank you. I was misled by Altair 8800!

Intel did originally call their iAPX CPU the 8800, but that’s almost got to be an unrelated coincidence because the Altair 8800 was launched in late 1974, but the iAPX’s development didn’t begin at Intel until 1975. The iAPX is also an utterly diverse architecture and instruction set that Intel abandoned later, and they continued with the x86 line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

The 6502 was also a lot cheaper -- around $25 compared to around $100 for the 8080.

For some reason people have mostly ignored the incredible technical achievements of the early Microsoft people. It was all sorts of unbelievable what e.g. Windows 95 was able to do on contemporary hardware

I always felt people thought windows 95 was amazing but it had significant support from the processor.

The earlier versions that ran on things back to the 8086 were more impressive, to me.

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