Top 10 Holy Grails of Classic Microcomputer Collecting

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Wed Oct 7 11:30:56 1998

< I meant, what was the proportion of each media at the time?

No idea, seems biased to tape where I lived (LI NY).

< Back in the days of my IMSAI experience, we had both an ASR-33 and
< a cassette interface card. I don't remember the relative costs,
< though. A cassette interface and deck were less costly than
< an ASR-33, even at ham radio prices?

1975-76 time frame a used ASR33 was 500-900$US. The only machines at the
ham meets were BAUDOT with 5level tape (and slower), they ran 75-150$US
for a good working one.

The ACR and a cassette tape were like 199$US and 35-45$US and faster as
well.

The third choice was an optical PTreader homebrew or commercial and they
required a parallel port (cheap or trivial build) and inexpensive.
Punching was again a cost thing and the old teletype BPRE punches were a
good find at 100-200$.

The point being things we take for granted as cheap or available now (or
during the 80s) were less common and expensive in the mid to late 70s.
Back in '76 showing up with some kind of terminal storage and more than
4-8k of ram and Basic generally put one in the fortunate class.

My altair by late '75 had a home made ascii keyboard attached to a
MITS-PIO and a modified (for 64char, 16line) SWTP CT1024 and a MITS
88-ACR and 12k of very flaky (solder plated edge connector rot) 88-S4k
ram. I was able to run MITS 4kbasic, 8kbasic and Programming package II.
That for its time was a power system.

A bit more history... the other systems seen at the time that were
pretty neat were the AMI EVK series (6800 SBC with decent amount of ram
and rom) and the SWTP 6800. I havent seen either one in years. Both
were pretty nice systems and less hardware intensive for the user. It
seemed to me at the time that the 6800 camp were doing more software work
and the 8080/s100 camp were into hardware.

Anyone remember the Viatron systems that were turning up surplus around
'75-78 time frame? It used tape and had a multichip LSI cpu.

Allison
Received on Wed Oct 07 1998 - 11:30:56 BST