14 Jun
1997
14 Jun
'97
12:24 a.m.
In particular, none of the Altairs I saw people
building in the
mid-70's worked as designed; there were typos in the assembly instructions
and to get reliable front panel operation most people had to tweak
the one-shots that controlled the timing. Some of these
modifications are well documented by John Zarella, in his Byte
(1975:4 p78) article "Assembling an Altair 8800".
RE:8800 (A version)
BIG TIME! As someone that built one of the first it was a dog to get going
and I had scopes and all the goodies. I'd also worked with the 8008 before
and was Intelized as it were. A friend build one about 6 months later and
it was still flakey as hell. First of many mods was to get the damm oneshots
off the cpu card and put in a 8224 clock generator. I got mine to a stable
state but when the S4K memories came out I upgraded asap. Better but far
from great. To many oneshots. In late '78 I
transfered my IO, NS* MDS to a
new HORIZON box with a 4mhz z80. used the altair
for a few years to support
testing (front pannel). I put it in mothballs about 84 and will likely
never use it again. To highly modified to even consider museum piece and in
'79 it suffered a lightining hit and was never right since.
Allison