To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Date:	Sat, 4 Nov 2000 03:23:12 -0800
Subject:	Re: Early gaming [was: FDISK]
Message-ID:	<20001104.033042.-4103817.2.domanspc@juno.com>
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From:	Robert W Moss <domanspc AT juno DOT com>
Reply-To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com

Sorry Bob, Check Pats  answer.  

We were talking about the MITS Altair 8800, I8080 based microcomputer. 
It was sold in kit form, (a case, some led's, some resistors, some
switches, 
some chips, some boards and a schematic).  You had to build it yourself, 
after you got the parts from MITS, who were up to six months behind in 
orders in the first 30 days.  
To get # 3, Steve Dompier went to Albuquerque, NM after three months 
waiting and badgered them into  giving him part of the kit parts and then

went home and spent 3 months waiting for several more baggies of parts  
which he assembled as the stuff came in.  He even had to write his own 
little diagnostic programs to check out his system and make sure it 
worked right and when he got his memory boards they didn't work right.  
Being a hardware hacker he eventually got it working and while he was 
doing some testing near his radio he heard the radio making noises, 
(in electronics we would call it noise or static from oscillations of the

computer Hf circuits being to close to the radio circuits.), which he 
thought sounding like some musical notes.  He experimented and 
eventually he was able to calcuate the exact sequence of actions to 
use in the computer to map each sound on a several octave wide musical  
scale.   Then he wrote a listing needed to play the song "Fool on The
Hill" 
and a several seconds delay and then play "Daisy".  He had no storage 
devices or paper tape input device, so he had to enter the 2000+ lines of

code by hand, each time he wanted to play them, using the 24 switches on 
the front Panel of the system box.  
The nite he went to show off his neat hack to his friends at the 4th
meeting 
of the Home Brew Computer Club , there was not even a place to plug in
the computer and his radio in the meeting room and he had to run a power
cord 
from another room and then the cord  was short, so he had to put it out
in 
the hall by the door.  
After he had keyed in  about 2/3 of the code, some boys running around
the 
halls ran into his power cord and pulled it out so he had to re-input the
code 
again.  He finally got it done and started to run the program and after
it was 
done with "Fool on The Hill" everyone started to cheer. Then it started
to play 
"Daisy" and when that was finished it sort of brought the house down. 
The blinking lights were there (36 Led's) but they were really only good
for 
reading   octal output code.  A lot of computers used the Led's even back
in 
the 50's.  They were neat to look at but if you really were limmited in
using 
them for output. At MIT they used speakers to play music on million
dollar 
computers that only had 4 Led's.  The Altair had 36 Led's in two rows and

24 switches in 2 rows for input.  You had to make your own peripheral
boards 
if you wanted them because MITS was way behind in getting anything done 
(about 6 months for a board that might not even work, and came in kit
form). 

Anyway that is considered by many people to be the real beginning of the 
Computer Age.  Cheap, Accesible, Small, Programable PC's for the masses. 


BOB 'DOMAN' MOSS "Chocolate is a vitamin"

On Sat, 4 Nov 2000 00:27:55 -0500 "Bob Jonkman" <bjonkman AT sobac DOT com>
writes:
 
> WAG:  I remember a program called "Kill The Bit".  It was loaded in 
> by keying in all the instructions from the front-panel switches, and 
> 
> the game consisted of a single LED lit sequentially along the data 
> register lights (think of a movie marquee with only one bulb lit at 
> a 
> time).  You won the game by flicking a data switch under the lit 
> LED. 
>  The score, obviously, was either 0 or 1...
> 
> It was harder than it sounded.  Even at a measly 1 MHz, that LED 
> could MOVE!
> 

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