Altair Owners ...

From: Doug Salot <doug_at_blinkenlights.com>
Date: Thu Jan 4 17:55:34 2001

>From various blurbs, the timeline I have is: Altair came out in 1975,
Pertec bought MITS (and ICOM?) around May/June 1977, and Pertec killed the
Altair line in July 1978.

-- Doug

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:

> 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 - 17:55:34 GMT