Altair 8800a on EBAY

If I remember correctly, the Altair, by the time one had the kits to build a complete computer, and if one didn't mind tracking down the errata sheets for each kit, and fixing the design errors, of which there were enough, was almost impossibly expensive, too. My first home computer only cost me $90 or so for all the components and boards, not to mention a box and power supply, of which the latter two were the largest part of the cost. The next largest cost after the box and power supply parts, was the 5" TV, which I hacked into a monitor. The boards cost about $22 for the bunch and the Keyboard cost about $10. I had a couple of grocery sacks of 21L02's that served as memory, the bunch of which came on scrapped KIM-2 and KIM-3 boards, which I got for six-pack, and used some wirewrap sockets that I scrounged from a simulation project that used tons of them. Of course I had to desolder the IC's from their boards, and unwrap and desolder the wirewrap sockets. The components in the WW sockets were useless, as they had been stock-numbered and I didn't want to figure out what they were. Building up an Altair back in the '70's cost about what an eBay Altair costs nowadays, by the time you figure in the cost of the fixes and the cost of the new components. If you wanted to save dough, you bought scrap boards and became good at scrounging the parts without destroying them. By comparison with the Altair, the Imsai, which was more or less the same thing, but had a more ostentatious front panel, worked much better, and their stuff generally worked out of the box or assembled as issued, with a few notable exceptions, including the early front panel. AFAIK, the early Altair front panel generally requires extensive modification, or disconnection from the system if you want the computer to work. It was, methinks, intended more to teach the user about how a computer works, when it works, rather than to serve as a truly useable front panel, though, under the right conditions and with the right boards, it was useable, even when the CPU was supposed to run as well. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Allain" <allain(a)panix.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 10:39 AM Subject: Re: Altair 8800a on EBAY