Altair Owners ...

Really! I sold off a MITS FDD that I'd had lying about for some 20+ years over the last year or two. My concern over the eventual dispositon of the artifacts I mentioned is probably unwarranted by the general lack of concern about much other than appearance. I have endeavored not to modify the orignal hardware beyond repairing broken electronic components, etc. The stuff I've added is added without physically modifying the orignal boxes, though that's not always easy. I'm curious about whether a "real" Altair user has preference for one or the other of the two modes of interfacing the clearly not original MITS electronics in the HDC box. My understanding is that the orignial interface to the HDC card set, missing from my HDC box, was a parallel port set. I could easily provide that, but am troubled by the fact it would be so much (probably 8-10x) slower than using the channel interface that works so well with the WD 100x controllers. Since the hardware I'd provide is not authentic in either case, it really doesn't matter, but it's a fine point I'd be concerned with if I were a collector. I have these old blank S-100 parallel port boards that were used for testing HDA's at Miniscribe in the '80's, and they're pretty easy to modify into either form of interface. The hardware I'm providing makes no attempt to do anything beyond filling the purpose and filling the open holes in the boxes. I do see this as an easy way for an Altair with no FDC or HDC to become a working computer, perhaps superior in performance and functionality to anything originally availble for the Altair. My quandary is that getting it working is a lot of work probably of little or no interest to a "collector" who just wants matching boxes stacked on the shelf. How do you see this? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Willing" <jimw(a)agora.rdrop.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2001 7:13 PM Subject: Re: Altair Owners ...