Altair Owners ...

From: ajp166 <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Fri Jan 5 18:23:28 2001

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
>
>As I've often heard, Altair had the reputation that nothing they ever
>shipped worked as shipped, often either requiring one pay for a service
of
>modifying it at the plant before it was shipped, or to fix it or have it
>fixed once it had arrived. From a historical perspective, an Altair
that
>actually works is an anomaly. That explains why they're all different.


Not quite. the 8800B was a solid machine and worked well.

The early 8800s were flakey but they did run. The most common
problems were they tended to crash for apparently no reason
and moving the boards on the bus affected this.

Their problems were obvious if you think on it.

    CPU clock was 2mhz crystal TTL gate OSC driving oneshots for the
    non overlaping two pahse clock... Poor.

   The bus and frontpannel if assembled "by the book {reads phamplet}"
   were interconnected by 18" wires! Can you say ringgggggg.

   The bus (original 4 slotters) were made singel sided with light ground
   and a but too thin material!

   The transformer was too light and slighly undervoltage. Filter caps
   and rectifiers were too small for the load beyond minimum.

The 8800A version fixed the most obvious (listed) and many more
subtle problems.

The key thing was compared to the more robust IMSAI, NS* and
later machines it was flimsy and it's reliability was poor.

Allison
Received on Fri Jan 05 2001 - 18:23:28 GMT