Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer • Hacker News Board

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#11

Post by SoftTalker » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #4

berlinbrowndev wrote: post #2

Cool I always thought the first PCs were like the TRS or Commodore 64 computers.

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box. I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer. For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monit…

Did it not have a serial port? Would have assumed that connecting it to a terminal or teletype was the standard thing.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#12

Post by SoftTalker » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #8

rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box. I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer. For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monit…

TRS-80, AII and the PET came later. You were right on the peripherals. Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.

A TV output means you need to create (and have memory dedicated to) the video. A serial port is much simpler.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#13

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #9

anthk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRS-80, AII and the PET came later. You were right on the peripherals. Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.

The people I know who put together Altairs in 1975 used ASR-33 teletypes as terminals to run BASIC.

Teletype and all, the Altair looked and worked like an cut-down entry-level version of the minis that were popular in engineering and science.

Not as powerful as a PDP-8, but less than a tenth of the price.

It was the perfect aspirational project for the electronics hobbyist community of the time.

The fact that you could barely do anything with it wasn't the point. It was a real computer you could set up at home and use without time restrictions or hourly billing.

The S-100 bus market turned into a preview of the PC market. S-100 systems soon sprouted real terminals, floppy drives, and workable memory, and began to appear in the offices of accountants and other non-tech professionals.

The IBM PC probably wouldn't have happened without it. It normalised relatively affordable computing, and the idea of a third party market of expansion cards on a standard bus.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#14

Post by whartung » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #11

rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box. I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer. For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monit…

Did it not have a serial port? Would have assumed that connecting it to a terminal or teletype was the standard thing.

My first computing experience was with an IMSAI 8080 that class assembled the year before.

It had a keyboard and video board, rather than a terminal. The monitor was open chassis to boot (ah the old days when we didn’t protect children from lethal electricity).

It had a ROM monitor and cassette tape. You had to type in (in hex) a short machine language program into the monitor to load BASIC from a cassette. We simply never turned it off.

I tried ti enter the bootstrap through the front panel once, but I made some mistake, and it didn’t work. It was an awful enough experience I never tried again.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#15

Post by rbanffy » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #10

igtztorrero wrote: post #3

The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal. Bill Gates: "Popular Electronics" magazine cover of January 1975 change my life" Paul Allen write the simulator on Harvard PDP-10, Bill Gates write main code of Basic, Monte Davidoff write Math package. They coded day and night during 2 months. Micro-Soft was born.

Similarly it inspired the start of Apple!

Apple got a couple things right - the II had a keyboard, TV output with graphics, and plug-and-play slots (no fiddling with jumpers and dip switches like s-100 and PCs): each card had a well defined space for IO and ROM.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#16

Post by rbanffy » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #12

anthk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRS-80, AII and the PET came later. You were right on the peripherals. Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.

A TV output means you need to create (and have memory dedicated to) the video. A serial port is much simpler.

A 16x64 character screen like the TRS-80 needed 1k of RAM. IIRC, the Altair didn’t have that much memory out of the box.

The video memory would either be in the computer or the terminal. At least if it were in the computer, you could use it for other stuff.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#17

Post by NoSalt » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

Wow ... the man who invented it, Ed Roberts, had quite the life:

  • Air Force enlisted

  • Air Force comissioned

  • Electrical Engineer

  • Computer inventor

  • "Gentleman" farmer

  • Medical doctor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#18

Post by thesuitonym » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #15

JSR_FDED wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly it inspired the start of Apple!

Apple got a couple things right - the II had a keyboard, TV output with graphics, and plug-and-play slots (no fiddling with jumpers and dip switches like s-100 and PCs): each card had a well defined space for IO and ROM.

Note that the Apple I was a kit computer that didn't come with anything other than the board and the chips. Not even a case! It's not really like Jobs and Woz had the brilliant idea that nobody had thought of before to include the accessories, it's just that the prices had come down to the point where a person wouldn't balk at buying a preassembled computer with a keyboard, display and a couple of floppy drives.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#19

Post by reaperducer » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:20 PM UTC

igtztorrero wrote: post #3

The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal. Bill Gates: "Popular Electronics" magazine cover of January 1975 change my life" Paul Allen write the simulator on Harvard PDP-10, Bill Gates write main code of Basic, Monte Davidoff write Math package. They coded day and night during 2 months. Micro-Soft was born.

Altair didn’t survive for very long,

The company sold itself to Pertec for what was a very good amount of money back then.

In HN terms, it was a successful unicorn bro exit.

Re: Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

#20

Post by ebruchez » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #11

rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box. I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer. For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monit…

Did it not have a serial port? Would have assumed that connecting it to a terminal or teletype was the standard thing.

One of the interesting aspects of the Altair was that it was based on a bus called the S-100 bus. You would have a CPU card and a memory card at least, but everything else was optional. The serial board was separate, and strictly not absolutely necessary to play with the computer, since you could enter simple programs directly from the front panel.