< > After reading some of the sentiments posted recently, what I'm < > hearing is that the price of Altair's is a bubble without < > underlying value, that is, they may be somewhat rare but aren't < > really great machines, like a Ferarri or whatever, and that < > the BASIC software for it wasn't very innovative. < < < That's basically my view. Same here. Historically important but generally poor design. I'd say machines like the NorthStar Horizon, CCS 2xxx series and CompuPro systems did more to put systems in business and other non hobby applications. I have several old enough to vote and they still run well. < > Also the Altair was a very open hardware platform, you had < > the schematics, you got the educational experience of No one would have bought it without! Assembling it would have been far harder too!