<was in full production and delivery while the Altair was still deliverin
<incomplete bags of parts and even those were months behind. In fact, mos
<Altair "kits" were delivered in installments spread over almost a year. Y
<got parts for one section at a time. I DO have that ad handy. I shoul
<scan it and post it.
As some one that built ans has one... MITS offered the kit of the month as
a way to get Altair into the hands of people that couldn't cought up $1000
at the front. I was doing engineering at the time and making a good buck
with out marriage so it was doable and I had mine in about 4 weeks after
the order (took UPS 10 days to deliver it then!). I may add it arrived on
a tuesday and I used my evenings to set up for assembly and that weekend I
started soldering and didn't stop till sunday night when first powerup
occured. I had a working machine. Three weeks later I would get docs
listing some 10-20 mods to make it more reliable! FYI the SN was in the
200 range.
Now the much better IMSAI machine was nearly a year later in arrival but
was actually better developed and a far more reliable design from the
first. It was a marker machine as it also used S100 bus making it the
Polymorphic -88 and the SOL-20 amoung the first to use the same bus and
the swtp-6800 started the ss50 bus. Back then an open and standardized
bus was a advantage to the person that owned the system and they werent
locked to one vendors board and the price competition was fierce. By
1978 memory board were denser (8k static vs 4k dynamic) and half the price
of the boards from MITS (88-mcd was ~400 for 4k).
Allison
Received on Mon Jan 12 1998 - 09:56:22 GMT