Altair Owners ...

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Jan 4 18:51:11 2001

Just how long did Percom own MITS? It's been a while, but I seem to
remember that I heard about the purchase of MITS by Percom at about the same
time that I considered whether or not to buy these boxes. That was in '80
or '81, but there could be a year or two running around in there somewhere.
I believed, until now, that the MITS floppy disk drive for the Altair was a
MUCH earlier type of drive than my oldest SA-900's and early GSI drives.
The MITS technology was definitely stone-age by comparison. Though the
drives were mostly plastic, and the interconnections were non-standard, I
guess it's possible that these were ten years later than they looked.

This stuff doesn't all line up with a reasonable time-line, based on the
technology, with when it was available, and when it was obsolete, nor does
it seem to line up with the dates by which things seemed to have happened.
One has to keep in mind that by 1980, Shugart was on their third level of
board revision for their popular model 800/801 drives. The second-revision
boards were available on drives in distribution, but the LSI board was
available. The technology in the MITS drive was, by comparison, more like
'60's technology. Maybe they just bought up some surplus and obsolete
drives because they were cheap.

Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Salot" <doug_at_blinkenlights.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 3:43 PM
Subject: Re: Altair Owners ...


> On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
>
> > MITS built them with a disk, didin't they? I can't imagine how the
> > dress-panel saying "Altair Hard Disk Controller" got on these boxes.
The
> > box bearing "Altair Floppy Disk Drive" on the front dress panel suggests
the
> > MITS people didn't feel the system was complete without one. I got
these
> > boxes in '81 or so, as they were liquidated from a MITS inventory
auction,
> > and I got a load of transformers as well.
>
> FWIW, I think all of the Altair disk subsystems were spawned after Percom
> bought MITS. IIRC, ICOM made a third-party disk subsystem for the Altair,
> and then Percom ended up buying ICOM around the same time they bought
> MITS.
>
> -- Doug
>
>
Received on Thu Jan 04 2001 - 18:51:11 GMT