Saved Altair 4K BASIC

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Wed Nov 11 07:41:27 1998

< Absolutely. I agree 100%. If he had priced it in the range that a
< hobbyist could afford, and proportionate to the cost of the system ($500
< for the kit?) then people would buy it. Its nothing to throw down $25 o
< $50 if you're getting a manual and support with that.

The KIT was $500, but that only got you the box and a CPU. Ram was
expensive then and the IO was either serial, tape, or parallel so you
also needed a TTY or CRT(I used CT1024). Still BASIC for MITS prices
was ok but as Billy's price it was out of reach.

FYI at the time of the article (early '75) a system with 32k of ram,
cassette and serial IO would be over $3500! The 8800 was cheap, but
not that cheap. Three years later (early 1978) that price would have
dropped to 1500 or less due to the lower cost of memory boards and the
lower cost of the system itself. The Disk system would be around late
'76 early 77 with software to lag behind it.

In 1977 you could get languages, for far less than $100 and many offered
features that MSbasic did not have. Examples of this were PT basic, Focal
and NS* disk BASIC. Also Tiny basic was published along with a little
later LLL8k Basic as examples of free software with sources available.
That trend nearly killed MS and did put a few others under. It was very
hard to make a buck on paper tape or cassette based software. Affordable
disk systems opened up the market and made it a serious force for applied
software.

Allison
Received on Wed Nov 11 1998 - 07:41:27 GMT