Several years ago I interviewed Forrest Mims III (one of the co-
founders of MITS, and also the author of piles of Radio Shack
project books, many of which kept me out of trouble when I was
growing up.....I now have several of them signed by Forrest, along
with a couple of original schematics from one of those books) while
I was really psyched up about starting a computer museum (before
I found this list and realized that I was not only not alone in my
desires, but also a complete rank amateur.....)
He did, in fact, confirm that story. He also said that Len Feldman
(then-editor of PE) really was the one who pushed Roberts into
doing the article, and that Feldman was also one to quickly take
credit for the entire Altair phenomenon.
He also remembers Ed Roberts going to the airport to pick up Paul
Allen in an old pickup truck.....
He never really met Gates and Allen when they had an office at
MITS. He said he was pretty much out of the daily operations of
the company by that point. He only remembers stopping by a
couple of times and hearing a lot of goofing off coming from one of
the back rooms....
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sellam Ismail"
<foo(a)siconic.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: Popular Computing on eBay for $150+
On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Michael Nadeau wrote:
> Another reference identifies Yates as a former Air Force officer
> with
an
An interesting thing about this article is that it says the first
prototype of the Altair, the one that was allegedly lost in
shipment, "arrived a year later".
If true, this is interesting in a "Treasure Hunter" sort of way.
Assuming the machine did eventually show up, it may still exist. The
legend of its loss is familiar to most collectors, so if you could
prove that you had _that_ machine, it would presumably be worth a lot
more than your average Altair. If Ed Roberts verifies this story, it
would be interesting to know if Altair prototype #1 had any features
that would positively identify it.
And no, I don't have any old Altairs I'm shortly putting up on eBay
: v )
Mark.
Paul Braun WD9GCO
Cygnus Productions
nerdware_nospam(a)laidbak.com
"A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without a bunch of
bricks tied to its head."