What can you do with an Altair 8800?

Question

I'm still not getting it. It's a box with some buttons that you can toggle. What can you use it for?

Answer 1

You use the toggle switches to enter in the binary codes for the assembly programs you want it to run (it used an Intel 8080 microprocessor). If you're lucky, there's a cassette recorder interface on it so you can store the programs once they work. If you're really lucky, there's a cassette somewhere with BASIC on it that you can load into the computer and write/run BASIC programs. I just found out that if you're spectacularly lucky, there's a floppy disk drive on it and you can load, save, and run your programs from that instead of the cassette.

If you really want to learn computer fundamentals like assembly language programming and hardware interface design, this will let you see your results directly without a user interface (i.e. Windows) in the way. It will also give you an appreciation for the incredible advances that have occurred in the last 30 years of computing.

You could consider donating it to a tech museum somewhere, especially if it works (and you need a small tax write-off). Or put it up on eBay for a collector to buy...

Answer 2

Boat Anchor??