I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm Grant from Alaska. :) Any other Alaskan's in here? I'm new to the group, still a little new to "real" classic computers. I'm the http://www.altairkit.com guy. I really started getting into them back in 2004 when I wanted to build a computer kit. I'd watched movies like "Pirates of Silicon Valley", read a Bill Gates biography, built a few kits like a Veronica PLL/stereo coder, but it still wasn't enough. I wanted to build a computer. Someone I knew harassed me in a friendly way that all I was doing was assembling one from a bag of parts. But it still meant something to me. I started with the idea of using a Macintosh 128k as a building block. I decapped a few of the PALs to read out the fusemap, but gave up the project after reading about Apple going after people for providing copies of System 1.0-5.0 on their web sites. I then started on the Apple-1. I worked on and off on that, until January 2006 when I found that a guy named Steve Gabaly beat me to it. I was able to quickly give up the idea and move onto an Altair - AND buy his Apple-1 kit. : ) What would make the Altair easier is actually being able to buy and hold a working machine in my hands. I didn't have access to an Apple-1 except for some high resolution PCB scans. I'm going to copy and paste a part of my web page into here for the sake of indexing robots. If 50 years from now my web site is down someone might want the full story. ;) See the link below for the story wtih pictues, otherwise look for the =========s for my intruduction to resume! : ) http://www.altairkit.com/creation_of_a_kit_story.html -------------------------- So an Apple I kit is out of the question, it's been done! My next favorite computer is the Altair, and it is actually obtainable! I found an Altair for sale with quite a few extra memory and I/O boards. It was in fairly good condition and had a few manuals, so I was happy. The D0 switch didn't work so I couldn't actually toggle in any programs, and in fact I never fixed that switch before completely disassembling the entire computer! The best part about the Altair that I had just bought was that it had been used by ARP Instruments as part of an experimental computerized music synthesis project. Included with it was a bunch of documentation on synth control, some disks containing the code, and some custom interface cards. I love time capsules, but the ARP story is for another day... http://www.altairkit.com/images/061118-ARP_unpacked_2597.jpg The ARP Instruments Altair - its alive...sort of... I began the project not wanting to "destroy" my Altair. I had after all paid a lot of money for it! Todd Fischer replied to me in an e-mail "One flag comes up that suggests that you're not as committed to this idea as you seem. When you write "I'm not interested in the project enough to buy a perfectly working Altair just to desolder all of the parts!", it tells me that you are limited in your intent.". I stuck to the idea of not desoldering the Altair for a good 5 months! In the mean time I had sent away some pictures of the CPU board to several companies that offered "Raw PCB to Gerber" conversion. That is where a raw PCB is placed on a calibrated high resolution scanner. With the aide of a human, the computer recreates the copper, drill, silkscreen, and solder mask (if present) Gerber cad files. I received responses that ranged from $200 to $1300. Since that was JUST for the CPU card and I had quite a few that needed to be reproduced, I decided to try "scanning" myself. I attempted to do this quite a few times using different software packages. Just to show you how hard I tried to avoid disassembling my original Altair boards... Since I work for a company that produces digital x-ray equipment, it was easy to get x-rays of the MITS boards. I actually scanned the bottom of the board, made that layer of the board translucent, and then overlayed the x-ray. This looked pretty good, but it is a LOT of work to "scan" a board by "tracing" the traces! It was pretty neat being able to see the traces that were underneath the ICs...even the traces under the dies! Quality is important to me, and I wanted boards that were as close to the original MITS boards as possible. I finally decided to turn to the PCB scanning outfits... http://www.altairkit.com/images/061118-Altair_8800_CPU_BD_Rev0-Composite.jpg The scanned/x-ray composite Altair CPU board. This is a scaled version. The file I was using was 300dpi. In the end, I decided to use <http://www.mhtest.com/>Mile High Testing Services to scan my boards. They were second to the cheapest and their web page made me feel confident. (If you contact them, tell Steven that Grant says "Hi"!) This involved me desoldering every single part off of the boards and then cleaning off all the solder/flux. See a pattern here? Someone gives me good advice and I try to take a different direction. ;) Advice from Steve Gabaly, creator of the Apple 1 kit, went like this "...if I were going to make an Altair I'd have the boards reproduced by a PCB scanning service and get a perfect set of boards in a few weeks with no hassle..." It wasn't QUITE "no hassle" because of the poor quality silkscreen on the original MITS boards. After spending an average of 10 hours on each PCB cleaning up and restoring the silkscreen, my cad screen looked something like this: http://www.altairkit.com/images/061118-CPUBD_Gerber.jpg The Altair CPU board Gerber file including my solder mask layer, the fonts don't seem to render very well on screen... I went through each PCB with a fine tooth comb. I repositioned all of the silkscreen elements to where I thought the original intent would have been. I also created a solder mask for the PCBs to improve appearance and to make it easier to assemble. Here are some sample before and after pictures of the 1k memory card. These don't show the worst cases, but are still good comparisons. http://www.altairkit.com/images/061007-2-88-1MCS_Right.jpg MITS board on the left and reproduction board on the right The MITS silkscreen was used where ever possible. Sometimes I had to copy and paste letters/numbers from other parts of the board. Quite a few times the first letter was on top of a pad, etc. I also shrunk the symbols so they would fit between the pads. The arrows now point to pin one instead of being on top of pin 2, etc... Before I found <http://www.pcbnet.com/>Imagineering Inc (they have inexpensive boards!) I avoided getting PCBs with a solder mask/silkscreen manufactured until the design was proven. There is the chance that the scan could have an error. So a prototype Altair was made using copper only boards. Here are a few pictures of the prototype: =============================== That is where I stop the kit story for this post. There IS more on the website if you're interested. So, in the end, what did I get? I WAS ABLE TO MAKE MY KIT!!!!!!!!!! : ) Of course, I had to MAKE the kit first... ; ) http://www.altairkit.com/images/061119-completed_altair_1974.jpg I'm working on a few other vintage computer related projects. I hope that I am able to provide other people with the same experience. : ) Hobby electronics kits like this won't last forever, especially these old ones with all of the old discontinued parts. Enjoy while it lasts! Grant