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Comment by svat | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

> It was the first commercially successful personal computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

> He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer."

(This looks like a good article/story that is not found on Wikipedia; just sharing these links for anyone who wants an overview / know what it is about, before diving into the story.)

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Wow, the price list at the bottom of that Altair article: $439 for the computer (in kit form), $262 for the 4K word memory board, $124 for the serial teletype board, and $1500 for the teletype terminal. The terminal is twice as much as the rest put together!

Musical tribute: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/a_sign_o...

As sung by Frank Hayes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMS6G83NqFQ

Right, but bear in mind that the "terminal" here is a teletype - basically a printer with a keyboard, as shown in the picture.

If you wanted a cheaper keyboard + display option, there was always Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" kit.

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

Furthermore, the Teletype was also your storage device, if you bought the Model 33 ASR. It had both a paper tape punch and a reader. For $1500 you got not only your hardcopy console terminal, but at the time the most compatible way to load and store programs and data!

There's a nice video here of a complete BASIC boot sequence - entering boot code, loading BASIC, then loading a BASIC program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk

As far as any program was concerned the TTY was just a serial port, and it couldn't tell the whether data coming in was from keyboard or paper tape reader.

Yup, that's why they were such useful devices! Even if you were ending up with inefficient storage (punching ASCII vs. binary, or expanded BASIC source vs. tokens), it was built-in.

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