It's really interesting to see how much work you had to go through to load a program on these early computers! Fortunately, I started my computer adventure with a Tandy Model I computer, which had the luxury of a Z80 CPU, built in Microsoft Basic, and a cassette tape interface. All this made learning about computers much easier.
I still have that issue of Popular Electronics. Got it in High School. Always wanted to build one, but never ad the money. I ended up buying a TRS-80 when it came out. Saved all my money as a paperboy!
Wonderful Project! At 16, my first computer was an Atari 400, then 800 That sparked my interest for Computer Science. Which led me to a lifelong career in IT. I never had an Altair, although I do recall a teacher of mine having one in the classroom many years ago. Just thinking back on those days is fun. We were all so naive as to where this technology was all leading us. I do have a arduino sitting in my parts bin collecting dust. I may try to at least get the simulator running on it! If not the whole project. Thanks for sharing this build!
Thanks, Mike! The Altair was always an object of curiosity to me, so--even though it's not an "original"--it's great to have a chance to play around with one! Going to be doing more retrocomputer projects soon, so be sure to follow along at element14.com!
I bought an Altair kit in 1976 for $395. I also bought the optional 4K RAM memory board. It also had the cassette tape reader/writer for program storage. For a user interface, I built a kit called the TV Typewriter. It allowed a standard TV to display a 32 character by 40 line display as I recall. User input was via a QUERTY keyboard. The only software available at the time was the Tiny Basic interpreter. You had to key in a 18-instruction boot loader via the front panel switches to get the cassette tape modem going to read in the interpreter. It all worked but was very tedious. I sold it all to someone in the early 1980s for about $100. I wish I had it all back now.
Did you sell it at the Trenton Computer Fest in New Jersey? I bought mine there for $125. Rebuilt the power beefed it up and stupid me, I unloaded it 85.
I built a real basic 8 bit CPU using discrete logic chips. I had been following Ben Eater's series of videos where he builds a discrete logic CPU using breadboards. I've improved on his design a bit and got PCBs manufactured, and added some of my own upgrades including 256 bytes of program memory, 3 additional registers and made a sound board
@@AirborneSurfer im not on the element 14 forum but I have a few posts on reddit design files etc for the boards are on GitHub WRFleete/DiscreteLogicCPU and an album on imgur imgur.com/a/Uaajrk2
Anybody else here because of Forrest M. Mims III? (AKA co-founder of MITS) That guy is my hero and why I got into hobby electronics in the first place.
@@AirborneSurfer Hey, thanks, Matt. Yeah, his engineering notebooks and David L. Heiserman's "How to Build Your Own Self-programming Robot" were some of my most prized possessions.
I emailed him a few years ago and thanked him for his books and his influence. I used the exact same books to introduce my boys to electronics. Both of them have built their own Arduino-based Altair replicas.
This is where cheap PCB manufacturing comes in handy. The free version of Eagle has a perfectly decent limit for small, function specific boards that can be chained together. The Arduino is also very extensible with character displays, LED matrices, shift registers running LEDs, and the TVout library. It can even run chiptunes. Using the serial connection it's possible to dedicate one Arduino to game logic, another to the play sound effects and another to run the display along with some inputs and create a decent game programming setup. Any chip that has inputs and outputs could serve as the basis for some fairly advanced ways to learn programming without being overwhelmed by the trappings of modern computing power.
I have an old Kaypro Laptop (state of the art in the '80s). I can't get over how heavy it was considering that it was not much more than a monitor, keyboard and floppy drive.
Ok, I did it. I totally copied your acrylic case (and made my own improvements to it.) With all that extra room, I added a VT100 emulator and some other stuff inside.
I preferred the Imsai panel as well. The Imsai panel used paddle switches which were easier on the fingers than the toggle switches. When I built a Z80 system back in the Elder Days, I used paddle switches pulled from a surplus DEC front panel. Fun Times. :)
Mathew great visit to 1975 things that might be fun to build a storage unit that had a memory core cube sitting in the center and back lite but with a SD cards hidden underneath the memory core. Remember the movie wargames the home computer had a pair of Altairs then he turned on the voice "would you like to play a game" That voice modual is what you need and remember the era monitors with green screens.
Thanks! This is just the beginning of a much bigger hardware build out along this vein. Since the retrocomputing scene took off, it's hard to find a lot of the niche machines (and even many of the mainstream machines) for a decent price, so I've got to add to my "collection" somehow! 😉 Stay tuned on element14.com for more!
Hey you got that front panel from me! You should have told me it would be famous! BTW, I've built dozens of these and I still have the same reaction when I first power them up.
The least this video could have done is mention he got the important parts from Chris Davis: front panel and metal 'Altair' strip. Yeah - you can just buy this plus the PCB as the Altair-Duino kit (I'm a happy owner of one). Very odd the video does not link to the kit he is basically replicating *using parts from that very kit*. Uncool, Element 14!
You were watching the wrong Shatner episode, Shatner clearly advocated the VIC-20 A lot of us, myself included, passed on the Altair and the Sinclair, until a computer with a full real keyboard hit our local store shelves with... color! And a BASIC built into ROM prompt
Instead of individual transistors and resistors, you could’ve just used hexbuffers with a resistor network. Saves a lot of components and makes it smaller.
Naw. The PDP-8e! Released in 1970! Came with real mass storage(tape drives) for under $5000! Better deal than the ibm pc released 12 years later. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8/E
Another awesome video. I remember back when the Altair was released and reading about it in Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics magazines. The real key for the Altair was that is had a bus of plug-in cards (dubbed the "S-100" bus because it had 100 connections and became an IEEE standard). A lot of companies made their name by making cards for the S100 bus. Prior to the Altair, MITS (the company that made the Altair) produced an early version of a hand-held solid state oscilloscope with a matrix of LEDs for the display dubbed the "mitScope" MS-416. I acquired one and it is a cherished piece in my "museum". Matt, you should consider reproducing this as a companion piece: www.vintagecomputer.net/altair-poptronics.cfm
Timex Sinclair with a 16K plug in memory module, used to spend hours inputting basic, bump the unit the wrong way and loose everything. One day it was deposited thru the window.
Why would I build a replica? I've got the real thing setting on a shelf right next to me ... although I haven't turned it on in over four decades. Also it always bugged me that the data switches were laid out in groups of three for octal. Groups of four for hexadecimal would have been much easier. I would write my assembly language programs out on graph paper. Then I'd translate them into machine language ones and zeros. All the instructions are one byte wide but some had one or two bytes of data. Writing all this out on paper in binary was not very practical and even octal seemed harder to grok than hex. So I guess if I wanted to build a front panel like that, I'd want to make some changes.
Octal is fast to read and input, going byte by byte it is easier to "punch" into the machine... at least it is easier for me to summarise the code into octals, my brain's processors understands which toggles to flip when it is laid out 257 faster compared to AF which is 1010 1111 in binary.
@@element14presents Sure, but then you have no idea of WHAT it is a snapshot of, if you took a zip file of the master branch on any given day. You lose all the metadata. You only know: At one point, this was the state of master. A git clone has the metadata for the traceability and reproduce-ability of projects like this. I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I want to re-create a projects months or years later, only to find out that the current master revision no longer works for me for whatever reason, and having no clue what revision I used back in the day. Also, you're bound to discover a bug or make some improvement, without git metadata you can't contribute your work back.
It's really interesting to see how much work you had to go through to load a program on these early computers! Fortunately, I started my computer adventure with a Tandy Model I computer, which had the luxury of a Z80 CPU, built in Microsoft Basic, and a cassette tape interface. All this made learning about computers much easier.
I still have that issue of Popular Electronics. Got it in High School. Always wanted to build one, but never ad the money. I ended up buying a TRS-80 when it came out. Saved all my money as a paperboy!
Wonderful Project! At 16, my first computer was an Atari 400, then 800 That sparked my interest for Computer Science. Which led me to a lifelong career in IT. I never had an Altair, although I do recall a teacher of mine having one in the classroom many years ago. Just thinking back on those days is fun. We were all so naive as to where this technology was all leading us. I do have a arduino sitting in my parts bin collecting dust. I may try to at least get the simulator running on it! If not the whole project. Thanks for sharing this build!
Thanks, Mike! The Altair was always an object of curiosity to me, so--even though it's not an "original"--it's great to have a chance to play around with one! Going to be doing more retrocomputer projects soon, so be sure to follow along at element14.com!
You need an arduono due for this.
@@LittleRainGames Or a Arduino Mega 2560 or a Genuino Mega 2560. :-)
I bought an Altair kit in 1976 for $395. I also bought the optional 4K RAM memory board. It also had the cassette tape reader/writer for program storage. For a user interface, I built a kit called the TV Typewriter. It allowed a standard TV to display a 32 character by 40 line display as I recall. User input was via a QUERTY keyboard. The only software available at the time was the Tiny Basic interpreter. You had to key in a 18-instruction boot loader via the front panel switches to get the cassette tape modem going to read in the interpreter. It all worked but was very tedious. I sold it all to someone in the early 1980s for about $100. I wish I had it all back now.
Did you sell it at the Trenton Computer Fest in New Jersey? I bought mine there for $125. Rebuilt the power beefed it up and stupid me, I unloaded it 85.
I built a real basic 8 bit CPU using discrete logic chips. I had been following Ben Eater's series of videos where he builds a discrete logic CPU using breadboards. I've improved on his design a bit and got PCBs manufactured, and added some of my own upgrades including 256 bytes of program memory, 3 additional registers and made a sound board
That's rad! Can you post some photos on element14 and tag me? I'd love to see them!
@@AirborneSurfer im not on the element 14 forum but I have a few posts on reddit design files etc for the boards are on GitHub WRFleete/DiscreteLogicCPU and an album on imgur imgur.com/a/Uaajrk2
Anybody else here because of Forrest M. Mims III? (AKA co-founder of MITS)
That guy is my hero and why I got into hobby electronics in the first place.
*raises hand*
@@AirborneSurfer Hey, thanks, Matt. Yeah, his engineering notebooks and David L. Heiserman's "How to Build Your Own Self-programming Robot" were some of my most prized possessions.
I emailed him a few years ago and thanked him for his books and his influence. I used the exact same books to introduce my boys to electronics. Both of them have built their own Arduino-based Altair replicas.
I had that same soldering station!
Then I threw it away and finally got a JBC. No more waiting minutes for bigger connectors to heat up.
This is where cheap PCB manufacturing comes in handy. The free version of Eagle has a perfectly decent limit for small, function specific boards that can be chained together. The Arduino is also very extensible with character displays, LED matrices, shift registers running LEDs, and the TVout library. It can even run chiptunes. Using the serial connection it's possible to dedicate one Arduino to game logic, another to the play sound effects and another to run the display along with some inputs and create a decent game programming setup. Any chip that has inputs and outputs could serve as the basis for some fairly advanced ways to learn programming without being overwhelmed by the trappings of modern computing power.
I have an old Kaypro Laptop (state of the art in the '80s). I can't get over how heavy it was considering that it was not much more than a monitor, keyboard and floppy drive.
More like a luggable than a lappy, eh? Does it still work?
@@AirborneSurfer I do still have it (as well as add-on module). It still works as good as the day it was new....Wordstar on a floppy rocks!
@@triptrish2 I'd love to see it! Post some photos and tag me on element14, if you would! Thanks!
I agree that is has no practical value and will take a long time to wire and debug, but that is the essence and spirit of DIY. Please do it!
Ok, I did it. I totally copied your acrylic case (and made my own improvements to it.) With all that extra room, I added a VT100 emulator and some other stuff inside.
Yeah, I saw that on Tindie the other day! Very cool! I'm actually working on a few more improvements of my own right now....
Bonus points for the mess of wires, that is pretty authentic for the era.
I was really working hard to reproduce the a e s t h e t i c of the era on modern hardware 😉
I always preferred the IMSAI front panel because it used groups of 4 (hex) rather than the Altair's groups of 3 (octal) representations.
I preferred the Imsai panel as well. The Imsai panel used paddle switches which were easier on the fingers than the toggle switches. When I built a Z80 system back in the Elder Days, I used paddle switches pulled from a surplus DEC front panel. Fun Times. :)
Sure, but 8080A instructions are easier to remember in octal 🙂
See the Bugbooks if you don't believe me.
Mathew great visit to 1975 things that might be fun to build a storage unit that had a memory core cube sitting in the center and back lite but with a SD cards hidden underneath the memory core.
Remember the movie wargames the home computer had a pair of Altairs then he turned on the voice "would you like to play a game"
That voice modual is what you need and remember the era monitors with green screens.
Thanks! This is just the beginning of a much bigger hardware build out along this vein. Since the retrocomputing scene took off, it's hard to find a lot of the niche machines (and even many of the mainstream machines) for a decent price, so I've got to add to my "collection" somehow! 😉 Stay tuned on element14.com for more!
Nice build
Can you please use proper circut diagramms! Use the led symbole instead of a graphical representation!
Hey you got that front panel from me! You should have told me it would be famous! BTW, I've built dozens of these and I still have the same reaction when I first power them up.
The least this video could have done is mention he got the important parts from Chris Davis: front panel and metal 'Altair' strip. Yeah - you can just buy this plus the PCB as the Altair-Duino kit (I'm a happy owner of one). Very odd the video does not link to the kit he is basically replicating *using parts from that very kit*. Uncool, Element 14!
Don’t worry, I’m totally stealing that case design! No more silverware box...
@@chrisdavis3055Aw - I liked the bamboo box. Well, you know I do ;). Oh well, that's progress for you!
Looks superb .
Hi, any reason you didn't use a ULN2003 or similar for the LED drivers?
Bill quit Harvard, not MIT. Paul went to Washington State. He went to Boston to work at Honeywell. He convinced Gates to drop out.
The Harvard vs. MIT thing was corrected in the lower thirds though. Thanks for sharing, probably best if one reads up for further info
@@Davedarko yeah I was just listening at first, sorry I missed it. But yeah the story is widely available
Yeah, definitely misspoke during the monologue, but caught it in post-production 😉 "Wrong school in Massachusetts...."
You were watching the wrong Shatner episode, Shatner clearly advocated the VIC-20
A lot of us, myself included, passed on the Altair and the Sinclair, until a computer with a full real keyboard hit our local store shelves with... color! And a BASIC built into ROM prompt
Cool build
I miss my BigTrak and my Transport dumper. That might have been MY first computer actually. Before my Trash80 Coco!
There is a sound buzz the whole video which is irritating when you have headphones.
It's irritating even without headphones. I only made it halfway through the video
Instead of individual transistors and resistors, you could’ve just used hexbuffers with a resistor network. Saves a lot of components and makes it smaller.
I build something that actually works! :D
A keyboard made up of only toggle switches?
That's just stupid... And silly... DO IT! :D
technically not a keyboard. It's literal bit-flipping.
I was thinking of the question in the video. I interpreted it as a qwerty keyboard with only flip switches. :)
I remember getting the kit.
How did you read my mind and then make this video?
That joy @14:30!
Absolutely LOVE this video.
Another source of my 40 year handle, Altair
Cries in DEC *everyone forgets about Digital*
VAX forever!
Naw. The PDP-8e! Released in 1970! Came with real mass storage(tape drives) for under $5000! Better deal than the ibm pc released 12 years later. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8/E
Where can I find the front panel and the metal strip (the one with “Altair 8800”).
Another awesome video. I remember back when the Altair was released and reading about it in Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics magazines. The real key for the Altair was that is had a bus of plug-in cards (dubbed the "S-100" bus because it had 100 connections and became an IEEE standard). A lot of companies made their name by making cards for the S100 bus. Prior to the Altair, MITS (the company that made the Altair) produced an early version of a hand-held solid state oscilloscope with a matrix of LEDs for the display dubbed the "mitScope" MS-416. I acquired one and it is a cherished piece in my "museum". Matt, you should consider reproducing this as a companion piece: www.vintagecomputer.net/altair-poptronics.cfm
Now this is right up my alley! Hit the link in the doobly-doo and let's chat about it more on element14--maybe we'll see more in the future!
"Speak to me Shatner" ::clicks thumbs up button::
I wish I had your enclosure-building skills.
Timex Sinclair with a 16K plug in memory module, used to spend hours inputting basic, bump the unit the wrong way and loose everything. One day it was deposited thru the window.
Can you please share the 3D model of the case?
Keying in Kill the Bit on a front panel shouldn’t take anywhere near 20 minutes. There are only 24 bytes to enter.
Excelente!
I wrote a sprite multiplexor on the C64.
Very cool! I've got some C64 projects coming up, so I'd love to see what you've cooked up! Ping me on element14 and show me what you've got!
"I made something that actually works!" Haha can relate to that feeling :D
I’ve an AltairDuino kit, but it’s missing that really nice case. Is it possible to buy it anywhere?
But can it do "Daisy" using RF and an AM radio?
Actually yes it can. I've done it many times.
Thumbs up at the Altair 6 scene!
No link to the front panel :-(
Bah.
That was a great opening 😂
Thanks for the tinnitus sound. Not. :)
I always wanted an Altair 8800
They're stupid expensive and rare. For ~&100US in parts, this is pretty accessible; you should try it!
You can build one way cheaper just tracking down the off the shelf parts
I am disappointed that you didn't use a Pi.
14:36 prepare to get startled! :-D
Why would I build a replica? I've got the real thing setting on a shelf right next to me ... although I haven't turned it on in over four decades. Also it always bugged me that the data switches were laid out in groups of three for octal. Groups of four for hexadecimal would have been much easier. I would write my assembly language programs out on graph paper. Then I'd translate them into machine language ones and zeros. All the instructions are one byte wide but some had one or two bytes of data. Writing all this out on paper in binary was not very practical and even octal seemed harder to grok than hex. So I guess if I wanted to build a front panel like that, I'd want to make some changes.
Many like to build a replica because this thing costs nowadays around 1k so stop bragging
Yeah, I was wasn't I. Maybe it's 'cause I'm old.
Cuz you can’t buy the real thing without shelling out way too much bucks. I just bought an Imsaii replica kit for less than $300.
Octal is fast to read and input, going byte by byte it is easier to "punch" into the machine... at least it is easier for me to summarise the code into octals, my brain's processors understands which toggles to flip when it is laid out 257 faster compared to AF which is 1010 1111 in binary.
17:45 reminds me of Patrick Stewart playing an old person :D
When worked on them, they weren't "retro".
I'd like to see someone make a clone of the real thing. Perhaps using a z80. Easier to get and still of the era. This was impressive though.
I'd like you to go into something more pure more easy and hard at the same time, a real challenge, maybe the Programma 101
Don't worry, there's more coming! This is just dipping toes in the retrocomputing water....
This is amazing! How can anyone give this a thumbs down?
If you are going to do that. Then why not rebuild the real thing instead. But I would use the Z180 if it was me.
So... the next video is gonna be a punch card reader? :P
Spoilers....😉
Next build an IMSAI 8080...
What is up with the whine noise? Ow
Heathkit et3400
Speak to me, Shatner.
Still have mine.
@@briandenley i also have the expansion unit with it.
@@jimkirk360 Me too! I added the full complement of Ram chips. Played with Tiny Basic.
i just realized that microsoft is microsoft because they wrote software for micro computers. wow lol
😍🤗
Quit MIT? I though Gates quit HARVARD... (???)
Same city at least.
I cringed so hard when you downloaded the zip instead of git cloning the repository...
Sometimes you just need a snapshot.
@@element14presents Sure, but then you have no idea of WHAT it is a snapshot of, if you took a zip file of the master branch on any given day. You lose all the metadata. You only know: At one point, this was the state of master.
A git clone has the metadata for the traceability and reproduce-ability of projects like this.
I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I want to re-create a projects months or years later, only to find out that the current master revision no longer works for me for whatever reason, and having no clue what revision I used back in the day.
Also, you're bound to discover a bug or make some improvement, without git metadata you can't contribute your work back.