Altair - A different perspective

it that day 10,000 was a lot of systems! < >Altair was the grandfather of the S-100 bus and CP/M, both of which < >fizzled and left only a minor mark on MS-DOS, which didn't fizzle. S100 would be dominent through the mid 80s. S100 system were being built with 80386s and ran faster than the PCs with same. I have a Compupro 8086/8088 10mhz that was faster than any IBM PC hardware in 1982. CP/M left a major mark on MS-dos being the source point! Also the idea of a BIOS is a CP/M concept. < >survivor. So, if somebody were really looking at collecting Altairs as < >machine that "started it all", I think they have been misled and would < >better off collecting the IBM PC, early Apples, early HP desktops, the < >PDP-8, and all of the PDP-1's they can find :-) To many slighly older PDP-8 and HPs were the early for runners for the small size and proximate affordability. < money, the prices lept ahead - but only in the brands which the collecto < recognised. The Altair is recognised as significant, is relativly < uncommon, and every article on computer history sings it's praises. You < could almost guarentee that the prices would go up. It's significance was that it was real and well exposed by Popular Electronics. The Mark-8 was less real in that it wasn't available as a complete kit or well presented. There are predecessor machines to both. If we want the first Microcomputer why not the intel MCS-8? You could buy one complete before either Mark-8 or Altair by many years. As to extoling the virtues, altair was in teh right place at the right time. Technically it was a DOG. The IMSAI was a vastly superior machine. Allison