What I like about this video is that it is shown in real-time and not edited or sped up. It shows what it was really like for those who used the Altair in 1975, which was leading-edge computing at that time. By today's standards, its unbearably slow, but in 1975 it was impressive to be able to have a computer that was smaller than a mainframe that often took up an entire floor of an office building.
In 1975 the college I was attending had a particle accelerator. The various counters were interfaced to an Altair 8800. I was NOT a science student so I don't know any more than that. I love watching the registers change when the software is running! I DID play Star Trek but we had to do that on the mainframe. The interface was a teletype and you could type
I played that Star Trek game in a Radio Shack store on the TRS-80 they had on display there. Was cool to be a kid when all the PCs starting coming out.
I remember old days when you use a stone to store up to 4 kb. You had to be rich in order to buy a stone writer. There was a hammer inside attached to a spring which made small holes as they represented 0's and 1's. They were read by a brush spinning at 50 rpm. Those pc's were powered by pedals you had to push with your feet.
Ah, the days of loaded and storing programs on cassette tape, I remember them well. It also was a great improvement when I got my Northstar Floppy disk drive in 1978. Now my IMSAI, has seen many improvements, including 8 inch floppy drives and 2 20 MB HD's. Slowly restoring my IMSAI back to health as it hasn't run in about 30+ years.
Brings back memories. I'm old enough to have built one when they first came out and ran basic on it after Bill released it. Star Trek was an awesome game for the time. Even on my current M1 iMac it looks like fun. 🤣
When I was a student at UC Berkeley back in the late 1970’s, my friends and I would go to Evans Hall late at night and play this game with a room full of other students. This was on a PDP 11/70
Hey Tim - I'm time traveling back from 2022. I'd forgotten how long programs took to load. The "classic" Star Trek game was fun to play in the day - and even more fun to program as it teaches a TON of lessons in computer programming. Thanks for sharing this.
I always wanted an Altarir computer ..I recall having the 1974 popular Electronics where it was on the cover ..Time went by and i became an Intel engineer .. and never had that chance ..Ahhhh !
I remember playing a similar game on my Atari 800XL. Sometimes our friends would pretend to be on the starship enterprise and one person would be the captain and the other person would be the one executing the command based on what the "captain" said. I forgot how long it used to take to load programs on cassettes. It was so much faster once I got a floppy disk drive.
What I like about this video is that it is shown in real-time and not edited or sped up. It shows what it was really like for those who used the Altair in 1975, which was leading-edge computing at that time. By today's standards, its unbearably slow, but in 1975 it was impressive to be able to have a computer that was smaller than a mainframe that often took up an entire floor of an office building.
48K Of RAM! That's almost a new car!
In 1975 the college I was attending had a particle accelerator. The various counters were interfaced to an Altair 8800. I was NOT a science student so I don't know any more than that. I love watching the registers change when the software is running! I DID play Star Trek but we had to do that on the mainframe. The interface was a teletype and you could type
I played that Star Trek game in a Radio Shack store on the TRS-80 they had on display there. Was cool to be a kid when all the PCs starting coming out.
One of the best computer games ever. I used to play it in RT-11 BASIC on a PDP-11 in the early 80s, at school.
You had time to watch an episode of Star Trek waiting for the game to load...
Its really nice to see classic computer tech like this that is still working today!
I played this game on a TRS-80 back in the late 70s'! I thought it was fun and amazing that it worked like it did.
Just amazing, the inventor of Altair is a genious that nobody knows, he should be known as the father of PC!
I remember playing this game on my Commodore PET and later, on a DEC VAX using a teletype terminal (no screen, just printed the output). Great times!
Played that game on a Compucorp computer otherwise used for calculations for 155mm howitzers in the army back in 1983.
I remember old days when you use a stone to store up to 4 kb. You had to be rich in order to buy a stone writer. There was a hammer inside attached to a spring which made small holes as they represented 0's and 1's. They were read by a brush spinning at 50 rpm. Those pc's were powered by pedals you had to push with your feet.
Good to see people younger than I am protecting these old beasts.
Ah, the days of loaded and storing programs on cassette tape, I remember them well. It also was a great improvement when I got my Northstar Floppy disk drive in 1978. Now my IMSAI, has seen many improvements, including 8 inch floppy drives and 2 20 MB HD's. Slowly restoring my IMSAI back to health as it hasn't run in about 30+ years.
Brings back memories. I'm old enough to have built one when they first came out and ran basic on it after Bill released it. Star Trek was an awesome game for the time. Even on my current M1 iMac it looks like fun. 🤣
When I was a student at UC Berkeley back in the late 1970’s, my friends and I would go to Evans Hall late at night and play this game with a room full of other students. This was on a PDP 11/70
Hey Tim - I'm time traveling back from 2022. I'd forgotten how long programs took to load. The "classic" Star Trek game was fun to play in the day - and even more fun to program as it teaches a TON of lessons in computer programming. Thanks for sharing this.
I always wanted an Altarir computer ..I recall having the 1974 popular Electronics where it was on the cover ..Time went by and i became an Intel engineer .. and never had that chance ..Ahhhh !
Good lord turning that thing on is like starting an airplane. Thunderbirds we are go.. blastoff
I remember playing a similar game on my Atari 800XL. Sometimes our friends would pretend to be on the starship enterprise and one person would be the captain and the other person would be the one executing the command based on what the "captain" said. I forgot how long it used to take to load programs on cassettes. It was so much faster once I got a floppy disk drive.