Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. Anyone can walk up and use this terminal, connected to a timeshared mainframe computer, for posting messages and announcements. That's a radical idea when computers are mostly inaccessible to ordinary people, and seen by the counterculture as tools of government and corporate power. It was an attempt to lower maintenance costs while bolstering disk drive reliability.
It was initially released with a 5 MB capacity, and two years later a 10 MB version was put on the market. Also, head alignment tools were removed, as maintenance on these parts was costly and time-consuming. Future disk drives largely adopted this feature. Most purchasers found the kit was difficult to assemble, unless they had experience with digital electronics and a workbench fitted out with sophisticated test equipment.
And even if one assembled the kit correctly it was sometimes difficult to get the Altair to operate reliably. Gift of Forrest M.
Nominate this object for photography. We got one of the original Altair in my department at North Carolina school of the Arts in It was a marvel that opened the world of digital computers to many of the students who like myself went on to successful careers as computer engineers.
It opened my eyes to the possible. Rob Aronson Mon, The Altair in your collection was one of the first five assembled units. Ed Roberts gave me this Altair in return for my writing the first operator's manual. While some builders of the kit version had problems, "sophisticated test equipment" was not necessarily required. A meter that indicated voltage and resistance was often all that was needed.
The main issue was the many solder connections. This especially applied to the rows of LEDs, each of which had to be properly oriented. While the original Altair lacked a keyboard and CRT monitor, users were happy to run simple machine language programs.
Forrest M. A box with no more circuitry than what is needed to light up a few LEDs…. Mims III a personal hero of mine. Those two men, along with Stan Cagle and Robert Zaller, decided to use their electronics background to produce small kits for model rocket hobbyists. The business was successful and it had articles published in Popular Electronics. While the business moved from model rockets to calculator and test equipment kits, Ed Roberts bought out the rest of the owners.
In , Art Salsberg, the new editor of Popular Electronics magazine was feeling pressure from Radio-Electronics magazine which had many former staff from PE.
R-E just had a cover story in July featuring the Mark-8, an based microcomputer. Salsberg knew he needed to find a real computer system for their cover.
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