Excellent video! I've been meaning to make up my own "8800c" build for a while now. Your Altair series since its inception has inspired me, a youngin', to go explore the world of 1970s computing. I can't imagine that I'm alone in that sentiment.
You are not 😊 I've learned Z80 assembly this year and wrote a BIOS for CPM 3 on John Winans' Z80 Retro board. I really enjoy that one in particular because it is still rather simple compared to even MS-DOS. But it has a lot of features under the hood that make it very usable and versatile. Like you can add or change functionality with RSX modules, you can add disk drivers at runtime, you can have up to 16 character devices with extremely flexible redirection, and it supports disks of up to 512 MB with up to 4000 files. My particular port is 27k in size but still gives 56k TPA. I also wrote a driver for the TMS 9918 VDP with basic adm3a functions, that uses another 3k if enabled. 2k of that are just the character bitmaps.
Another Great video from Deramp, Thanks... I started out with the Heathkit H8 ~1977 or 78, forget which. It was not as sexy as the Altair or IMSAI but there was very good support at the time from the Heath Users Group, HUG. I managed to get a Model 33 teletype which I later gave away once I got a much faster dot matrix printer, wish I still had the 33. Anyway, so glad to see all of the recent interest in the 8-bit stuff. I have modern kits for the Altair, IMSAI, DEC PDP 8, and 11/40. The small company which made the DEC kits will soon have the PDP 10 and looking forward to building it as well. Thanks for all of your excellent video's and keeping this vintage equipment relevant in these days of ultra high speed systems with huge storage and amazing graphics. Sadly, the majority of the users of our modern equipment have no interest or knowledge of what is going on inside as they post one more selfie with their dinner.
Love these videos and really wanna use casset on my setup soon. I dont have an io board that can use casset currently but that is definitely something i have to do one day on my imsai or altair 8800c
Yes, you are correct, 8" drives were the first available for these early computers. However, they cost far more than the computer system itself cost. When Shugart introduced the 5.25" drive and companies like North Star developed floppy subsystems that employed these new drives, the cost of adding a floppy drive to a home computer dropped dramatically. A 5.25" floppy subsystem was about 1/3 the cost of an 8" floppy subsystem. The affordable 5.25" floppy subsystem dramatically changed the personal computer marketplace.
@@deramp5113 You are right about the much higher cost of the 8" drives, but I didn't add my 8" drives, Qume brand, right away but when I did it was for the storage space available. Mine were dual sided double density (DSDD) that held a whopping 2.4MB each! 😀 And the cost was, $525.00 each, and for two the cost was way more than my original purchase price for my basic Altair, $439.00, with extra memory to bring it from 256 byte up to a total of 1K!!
This is pretty cool, I had no idea the Altair cassette interface was as complex as it was moree so when compared to a Commodore or Apple II. Floppy controllers look simpler! I am courious, do you use any other types of boards on your Altair or other S-100 like mass storage interface or anything else interesting?
what about a tape punch and paper tape reader to load and save programs on or take the cassette mechanism for a Philips DCC900 and use the data lines for input and output and will output or input as full 8bit bytes
Excellent video! I've been meaning to make up my own "8800c" build for a while now. Your Altair series since its inception has inspired me, a youngin', to go explore the world of 1970s computing. I can't imagine that I'm alone in that sentiment.
You are not 😊
I've learned Z80 assembly this year and wrote a BIOS for CPM 3 on John Winans' Z80 Retro board.
I really enjoy that one in particular because it is still rather simple compared to even MS-DOS. But it has a lot of features under the hood that make it very usable and versatile. Like you can add or change functionality with RSX modules, you can add disk drivers at runtime, you can have up to 16 character devices with extremely flexible redirection, and it supports disks of up to 512 MB with up to 4000 files.
My particular port is 27k in size but still gives 56k TPA. I also wrote a driver for the TMS 9918 VDP with basic adm3a functions, that uses another 3k if enabled. 2k of that are just the character bitmaps.
Another Great video from Deramp, Thanks... I started out with the Heathkit H8 ~1977 or 78, forget which. It was not as sexy as the Altair or IMSAI but there was very good support at the time from the Heath Users Group, HUG. I managed to get a Model 33 teletype which I later gave away once I got a much faster dot matrix printer, wish I still had the 33.
Anyway, so glad to see all of the recent interest in the 8-bit stuff. I have modern kits for the Altair, IMSAI, DEC PDP 8, and 11/40. The small company which made the DEC kits will soon have the PDP 10 and looking forward to building it as well.
Thanks for all of your excellent video's and keeping this vintage equipment relevant in these days of ultra high speed systems with huge storage and amazing graphics. Sadly, the majority of the users of our modern equipment have no interest or knowledge of what is going on inside as they post one more selfie with their dinner.
I've been interested in something like this for a while! Looking forward to the video about the 88-2SIO!
Such a neat S100 system! Some S100 systems used cheaper software bashed I/O bits for their serial and tape interfaces at a max of 19200 baud.
I love it!
Love these videos and really wanna use casset on my setup soon. I dont have an io board that can use casset currently but that is definitely something i have to do one day on my imsai or altair 8800c
Very nice!
8" floppies were first before 5-1/4" in my recollection. My first floppies were 8", circa 1980, and I still have them.
Yes, you are correct, 8" drives were the first available for these early computers. However, they cost far more than the computer system itself cost. When Shugart introduced the 5.25" drive and companies like North Star developed floppy subsystems that employed these new drives, the cost of adding a floppy drive to a home computer dropped dramatically. A 5.25" floppy subsystem was about 1/3 the cost of an 8" floppy subsystem. The affordable 5.25" floppy subsystem dramatically changed the personal computer marketplace.
@@deramp5113 You are right about the much higher cost of the 8" drives, but I didn't add my 8" drives, Qume brand, right away but when I did it was for the storage space available. Mine were dual sided double density (DSDD) that held a whopping 2.4MB each! 😀 And the cost was, $525.00 each, and for two the cost was way more than my original purchase price for my basic Altair, $439.00, with extra memory to bring it from 256 byte up to a total of 1K!!
We need a reproduction SSM IO-4 board! Perhaps an updated design to eliminate the chip/jumper wires.
This is pretty cool, I had no idea the Altair cassette interface was as complex as it was moree so when compared to a Commodore or Apple II. Floppy controllers look simpler! I am courious, do you use any other types of boards on your Altair or other S-100 like mass storage interface or anything else interesting?
Thanks for the vid. I'd love to hear the audio from that tape. I've never heard an Altair tape.
IIRC, it's just standard Bell 101 encoding. If you ever heard a 150 or 300 baud AFSK modem, it's the same modulation scheme.
What model Wyse terminal is that?
what about a tape punch and paper tape reader to load and save programs on or take the cassette mechanism for a Philips DCC900 and use the data lines for input and output and will output or input as full 8bit bytes
Here's a high speed paper tape reader/punch configured to look like an Altair cassette th-cam.com/video/wALFrUd6Ttw/w-d-xo.html
This video was made in late two thousand twenty* three 🤣
I forgot about that in editing. Thanks for reminding me!