Altair, 3 more months.

In approximately 3 months I will be moving from Hawaii back to the mainland and will finally be able to reclaim the computer collection that has been in storage in my parents' barn since 1996 when I left for college. I so hope that the old Altair 8800b is still operational. In highschool I used to use this machine with a 9600 baud modem to call the local BBS, Wrote papers for school in WordStar, played a character-graphics version of Aliens and Pacman.. At the same time, I had a 486 DX4 120 with an SVGA and a monochrome card and monitors (I wrote a tsr that would copy the text contents of the color display onto the mono with one key combination and clear the mono with another, very handy while playing TradeWars 2002 on the local BBS), This machine was always used far more, but the Altair would always get fired up on a regular basis, often for no real reason. The first program I ever wrote on it was in BASIC and just bounced a light back and forth across the front panel display. I can't wait to see the old machine again! The smell of baking dust, the vacuum cleaner roar of the hard drive and the 50's Sci-Fi squeal of the r/w heads moving across the disk, the boxes of 8 inch floppies all bring back so many memories! Anyone else out there with an Altair? Is there anyone actually using a CP/M machine in some productive way? It's sad that even if rats dust and time have not destroyed the beautiful blue machine, I can never really trust storing files on it anymore without backing everything up onto more modern media on my "real" computer (currently an eMac believe it or not.. what a strange trip it's been).