Emulating the classic Altair 8800
Having delved into various emulators of long-gone computers in recent issues, we’ve become accustomed to how primitive some of these early machines really were. Even so, we suspect that the specification of the computer we’re looking at here will still be quite an eye-opener. That machine is the MITS Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and its claim to fame is that it was the first personal computer to be aimed at enthusiasts, as opposed to business users. The first most people had heard of it was when it featured on the front cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975. Compared to the home computers of the early 80s, like the ZX80 or the BBC Micro, you didn’t get a lot of computer for your money.
The processor was an eight-bit Intel 8080 that was clocked at 2MHz, and the memory capacity was just 256 bytes. What’s more, that RAM wasn’t augmented by a non-volatile ROM containing a primitive operating system or the BASIC language, it didn’t have a keyboard, there was no way of attaching a screen, not even a low-resolution TV, and there was no storage such as a cassette recorder, let alone a floppy or hard disk. Yet it cost $439 as a kit, or $621 ready built – prices being today’s equivalents of $2,200 and $3,100 respectively.
It would be understandable, when presented with a list of everything the Altair 8800 didn’t have, that you might wonder how it was possible to do anything at all. As we’re about to see, though,
