what would you even do with this? watch lights blink?

>>105555578 (OP)
You can hook a terminal up to it and program with Altair BASIC.

>>105555578 (OP)
Manually program a boot loader with the switches on the front then load 4-bit basic from a ticker tape. From there, just look at the functions present in 4-bit basic, that's what it can do.

>>105555578 (OP)
Yes. Lights that *you* directed to blink.
Doesn't matter if it's 16 or 16 million points of light. It all comes down to the fact that you directed them to blink in some meaningful way.

>>105555578 (OP)
I don't get how a computer that was powerful enough to have a text based UI only had single LEDs as an interface by default.

>>105555760
It was a kit and the mere fact of having a computer at home was completely insane.

>>105555760
I think that most people who bought these got one, and then a terminal later down the line, the front interface being there just so you didn't have a brick in the meantime

>>105555605
>4-bit

>>105555760
Terminals were expensive as balls because video text generation.
Quickly though people realized you could cheap out and make monitor drivers with pwm circuitry instead of generating clean sine waves.
For example, Woz did it for his Apple I.

>>105555578 (OP)
You could actually game on it. I think I saw on youtube a game you play the lights and switches.

>>105555578 (OP)
You could do math with it, you can play kill the bit.
You can put a poorly shielded speaker wire near it and cause the radio interference to play a song poorly.
You could sink tons and tons of money into making and buying 3rd party addon boards and devices.
You can add paper tape readers, 12 inch floppy drives, 5.25 inch floppy drives, extra ram cards, terminal/tty interfaces. Even fricking hard disk drives.
You could really do alot with it if you wanted to spend ungodly amounts of money on what originally sold as a very very expensive novelty kit.
Similar to Heathkit computers.

>>105556176
Are electronics components really that much cheaper now?

>>105556251
Yes, by a huge margin. I suggest reading some old electronics catalogs and feeding the prices into an inflation calculator.

>>105555578 (OP)
>watch lights blink?
Yes. The blinks aren't meaningless but a information packed binary message.

>>105555578 (OP)
>let me guess you need more

>>105555578 (OP)
>watch lights blink?
Yes. The same thing as modern computers.

>>105555578 (OP)
This. But on your desk. In binary.

>>105555760
>I don't get how a computer that was powerful enough to have a text based UI only had single LEDs as an interface by default.
cost. eventually hobbyists made all kinds of shit for it and published schematics or sold kits/completed parts to turn it into a much more usable system. was an expensive hobby.

>>105556251
>Are electronics components really that much cheaper now?
hell yes, especially ram. the cost of ram back in the 1970s was insanely expensive.

>>105556119
Yes, 4-bit. 8-bit basic required disk or magnetic tape loading and needed more memory.

>>105556508
> just think of all the porn this will generate one day

Run altar basic, terminal software, cp/m

>>105556624
don't you mean 4k vs. 8k basic?

same thing you do with a desktop computer by itself, you provide a means of input and output
https://youtu.be/qv5b1Xowxdk

>>105556251
oh fuck yeah. the altair 8800 is from 1974, integrated circuits themselves were still new technology
most people weren't using video displays then as the electronics and memory required to drive them was expensive. things did advance at an extremely fast rate however

>>105556251
One TB of memory when that computer was released would have cost $2.1 trillion. Not that the world was capable of producing anywhere near that much RAM.
Storage was less expensive, only costing about $1.2 billion per TB.

>>105557413
Yeah, but we're talking about the chips they were using, how does saving a $2 ttl chip help that much?

>>105555760
werent these meant for schools and enthusiasts in an era where "personal computers" were still like 100kg and cost the same as a new car

>>105557628
The CPU in the Altair cost $2500 in current dollars. Not sure if you're trolling or just don't have any concept of all ICs being expensive back then but I'm tired of you and will reply no more.

>>105557787
The post I replied to didn't mention microprocessors. It was Woz's Apple I video, which used TTL chips, which are a few dollars in 70s catalogues.

>>105557628
ttl chips were cheap enough (though you often needed many of them), but microprocessors and static ram were not (these days we use dynamic ram because it's cheaper, but dynamic ram requires additional circuitry to handle them so it was cheaper back then to use less sram than make a system to handle dram, at least for the "low cost" systems being talked about itt)

>>105558169
-- like, the first truly affordable microprocessor, one that ended up in absolutely everything including the Apple I, was the MOS 6502, which came out AFTER the altair 8800 (1975 vs. 1974). that's how early the altair was

>>105555578 (OP)
Does it also go beep boop beep boop like a computer?

>>105555578 (OP)
Play vidya.
If you own an Altair, you are obligated to play a game of Kill the Bit.

>>105558247
No speaker.
Only RF interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stsjzvqiqYI

>>105555578 (OP)
play 1D pong

You insert expansion cards in the back to get more functions.

>>105557718
> where "personal computers" were still like 100kg and cost the same as a new car
personal computers didn't exist before things like altair. access to computers in the mid 1970s meant paying for time to access a timeshare mainframe owned by some corporation or university that cost millions of dollars and you accessed it via a teletype paper/video terminal. the altair was the raspberry pi of its day.

>>105555760
>>105557718
what else would it have had? a video display? i doubt many minicomputers came with that much less a microcomputer
the altair predates the concept of a personal computer, while i wasn't around at the time, i know enough that it was more likely described as a "hobby computer". it wasn't aimed at people who weren't specifically interested in computers like computers are today. it was even typically offered as a kit you built yourself, which should tell you all you need to know. you were expected to pair it whatever else you wanted, such as a teletype for input/output
having a computer at home was only for die hard hobbyists, anyone else who wanted to use a computer did so by getting timesharing time on a minicomputer/mainframe, or being a big business renting something from IBM

>>105562544
looking at that picture it seems even calling it a microcomputer may be anachronistic. i haven't looked into when that term was first used
"microcomputer" is what we used to call personal computers, being smaller than "minicomputers", the room-sized ones, but the altair may have predated this term

>>105562544
>what else would it have had?
Some type of digit display.
Even in the cover if that magazine it implies that LED digit displays where relatively low cost compared to the machine if $90 gets you a whole calculator

Multiple words could be displayed rather than just one.

>>105562654
yea, but the altair was meant to be cheap
i don't know enough about the landscape at the time to know why they decided on toggles and leds outside of it being an extremely cheap way to have /some/ form of I/O and debugging capability without external hardware
i am aware of slightly later kit computers that did that though, like the KIM-1 with a keypad and segmented led display

>>105562720
(note that even that, a $245 single board computer is equivalent to nearly $1,500 today)

you would invite over your fellow long haired bearded nerds to come over to your garage and be impressed with your PERSONAL PRIVATE COMPUTER and then smoke dope and watch the lights blink.

>>105555578 (OP)
Same as a modern computer. Install expansion cards and hook it up to peripherals. Then use it to run calculations, programming, playing games, etc.
You wouldn't judge a modern computer without providing a keyboard and display of some sort, exact same for the Altair. Very, very few people relied on the switches and blinkenlights as their main interface.

You gut it and put a high end computer inside like the inventor of linux did.

>>105555578 (OP)
Recreational machine code programming fucking casual

>>105558264
>if you own an Altair,
shouldn't you be off genociding the human race through collective vaccination damage bill?