I Bought the Cheapest Altair 8800 Computer on Ebay

Sorry for the long wait! This video took over 80 hours to produce, a good chunk of which was in the animated sketch at 40:12 . I'm particularly proud of the animated trees which are entirely my creation (the tornado is green screen.. not quite at that level of skill.. yet) - a simple thing to a professional animator but like summitting Mt. Everest for a novice like me. Okay, okay, a HUGE chunk of that production time was having to learn programming an Altair 8800 the hard way. The confusion of having dual purpose data/address entry switches and tiptoeing around octal took me down some seriously deep rabbit holes, and I am indebted to the very patient members of the vcfed.org/ forums for helping pull me out! Have I told you I suck at math? I suck at math. An epiphany that hit while I was working on this and biting my nails over how long it was taking: I think I'm kind of done even trying to chase the algorithm. I'd rather not have the pressure of a schedule, so I can focus on making art. I really enjoy that last 10% of the process, when the main editing slog is done, and now I get to spice things up with a salty Robot TV director or get blown up turning on my Altair. Too often I've had to short circuit that to hit a self-imposed deadline, because, gasp, it's been 2 whole weeks since I last uploaded! I've done a lot of thinking and my preference is to just make the best quality video I can while still having a life outside of work (video editing most definitely is work, sometimes it feels pretty close to The Hot Place). If it takes 2 weeks to make a video at a sane pace, great, if it takes 6 weeks, so be it. The channel recently hit 2 million views and I am absolutely blown away that my creations have been viewed that many times! Thanks to all of you for your support, be it just viewing, sending a positive comment, or joining my small but awesome Patreon crew. Hope you enjoy watching this video as much as I enjoyed making it! Cheers! PS: Special thanks to my daughter Jacqueline for colorizing the Altair drawing from the MITS manual, as well as Steve Dompier's "Altair Music" sketch! I don't know if either ever existed in color but if they did I think she probably got pretty close to what they would have looked like!

The front panel alone is worth two grand, scuffs and all. A timeless classic.

I learned BASIC in Mr. Dyk's class in 1976 on 2 16K Altair 8800a micros, one with an ADM3 terminal and the other with a teletype 33. We also formed an after school computer club and made a computer dating service. The story on page 8 of MITS Computer Notes for July, 1977.

The front panel switches are mapped in octal because that is the way the 8080's instructions are decoded. It makes it much easier to memorize all of the binary opcodes because you only need to learn a simple pattern, rather than all of the 256 possible codes. The upper two bits define the type of operation. The two lower 3 bit groups are the parameters specific to the type of operations. Our early assembler was offsite on a timeshare machine. Programs came on paper tape. We had a paper tape loader in ROM. I did many program patches via a switch panel, as a reassembly was a laborious processs that involved punch cards and a trip downtown. It was handy to have the instruction set memorized. Thanks for the video.

Thanks to the patreons for enabling this documentary excellent content

In a professional environment, I worked with two different S-100, Cromemco systems. The first was a Z80 computer designed for doing weather graphics. It was called a ColorGraphics LiveLine II. I think it used a Dazzler card, a DEC VT100 terminal, a 10MB hard drive, and a GTCO tablet. An 8-bit rudimentary graphics system used for broadcast meteorologists for their presentations. I couple of years later I was using a ColorGraphics ArtStar 3D Plus. It was a 24 bit true color system, but still based on an S-100 bus. The CPU was now a Moto 68020, and instead of CP/M, it ran a UNIX clone called CROMIX. Even with the 68000 based CPU, I saw references to Z80 in the files on the system. Oh yeah, this thing had a massive 200MB hard drive! I have some demo videos of the ArtStar, here on YouTube. It's what I learned 3D animation on, for better or worse. The ArtStar was also sold as a weather graphics system, called the LiveLine V. It even had a bit-slice processor!

Great video. Seeing your old Altar playing music was fun to watch. I have two IMSAI 8080's and two or three other S-100 buss based computers. My IMSAI's are a hodgepodge of cards inside, and the power supplies are over-designed linear tanks. I have them running two different operating systems. One is a custom OS design based on NorthStar DOS and the other is called ZRDOS, or Z-80 Replacement DOS (a Z-80 replacement for cp/m, which was designed for the 8080), custom BIOS, with the user interface of ZCPR3. Both systems use the Cromico ZPU. One of them runs both 8 and 5-1/4-inch floppies with a 20meg SCSI hard drive, and the requisite serial terminal. My second IMSAI is just a basic computer. Front panel programmed to boot. I think it's my favorite.

Nice video. Watched the whole thing! The intro was pretty amusing and hooked me.

I have sold the Altair 8800 on eBay for $10,000 - the record to date as of this post. I took a selfie with it for fun and posterity. I really appriciate the time and care you put into making this video.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience and the really interesting explanation!

Fabulous stuff, Brad! The time and effort you put into these videos really shows and is appreciated. The demonstration of the origins of computer music was really excellent - I'd read about it but now I've heard it! Wishing you and yours a great Christmas and new year!

I look forward to your new videos so much, regardless of how long between uploads you need to get things to a point you’re happy with. Thanks for teaching me so much about these old machines!

thanks, I know a lot more about the altairs than I did before and was really entertaining to watch

congrats on the new addition to your collection!

This is the first video of yours I've come across and as a hardware geek this has the be the most in depth look at an 8800 I have seen so far, most videos I have found just show a quick glance inside and then go off on the history of it. Cheers for sharing all the model and internal info all in one place!

Great video. As a fellow artist i appreciate the creative touches and laughed out loud more than once. I needed those laughs today thank you!

Gosh! This is the inspiration I need to finish my Altair clone kit! Next year I should have enough time after work to actually do it!

Fantastic video! Thank you so much for sharing this!! ❤

Fantastic video and great to learn about! :)

A friend of mine from college built his own S100 bus computer. He had a mix of boards from Altairs, Processor Tech, Imsai, and a few others. He had a slightly burned up front panel board from an Imsai, that needed a lot of repair. The board had bad chips, burned or missing traces, and a lot of bodge wires from repair attempts, He studied the schematics of both the Altair and Imsai panels, and then drew up his own simplified version. He replaced lots of triple and quadruple NAND, AND, NOR, and OR gates with diode wire OR arrays and inverters. In a few places he used discrete transistors. His Frankenstein panel worked as well as the Imsai one did, and he even added a few extra features. He found a bunch of static 22 pin ram chips that would almost be a pin for pin drop in for the 22 pin drams MITS attempted to use on their DOA 4k ram board. He also modded a second MITs 4K dram board to use the refresh the drams using the Z80's refresh signals (after he replaced the 8080 cpu card with a "ZPU" card.) His power supply used surplus transformers and capacitors (totalling almost HALF a FARAD for the 8v line). The thing could have powered and ARC WELDER. I worked at a small computer store in Manhattan while in college. The owner was literally a hippy, ex musician. I built SWTPC kits for customers that wanted them assembled. I also repaired bad memory boards that kit builders couldn't get to work. Most of the time the problem was a small short on the PCB where it hadn't been etched enough. I got pretty good finding faults with a cheap oscilloscope, logic probe, and a DMM.