Altair, 3 more months.

From: Steven Leach <stevenaleach_at_mac.com>
Date: Thu Nov 7 23:13:01 2002

In approximately 3 months I will be moving from Hawaii back to the
mainland and will finally be able to reclaim the computer collection
that has been in storage in my parents' barn since 1996 when I left for
college. I so hope that the old Altair 8800b is still operational. In
highschool I used to use this machine with a 9600 baud modem to call
the local BBS, Wrote papers for school in WordStar, played a
character-graphics version of Aliens and Pacman..

At the same time, I had a 486 DX4 120 with an SVGA and a monochrome
card and monitors (I wrote a tsr that would copy the text contents of
the color display onto the mono with one key combination and clear the
mono with another, very handy while playing TradeWars 2002 on the local
BBS), This machine was always used far more, but the Altair would
always get fired up on a regular basis, often for no real reason. The
first program I ever wrote on it was in BASIC and just bounced a light
back and forth across the front panel display.

I can't wait to see the old machine again! The smell of baking dust,
the vacuum cleaner roar of the hard drive and the 50's Sci-Fi squeal of
the r/w heads moving across the disk, the boxes of 8 inch floppies all
bring back so many memories!

Anyone else out there with an Altair? Is there anyone actually using a
CP/M machine in some productive way? It's sad that even if rats dust
and time have not destroyed the beautiful blue machine, I can never
really trust storing files on it anymore without backing everything up
onto more modern media on my "real" computer (currently an eMac believe
it or not.. what a strange trip it's been).
Received on Thu Nov 07 2002 - 23:13:01 GMT