~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big Altair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Despite some recent setbacks, (a story for another
day,) I must acknowledge that I have a pretty
darned good job. Which I possibly don't deserve,
and for which I am rather grateful.
For example, one of my projects at work is
developing and curating a collection of old
computers and software. Yes, that's right: I get
paid (partly) to do retrocomputing, and I have a
nice, well equipped lab space in the basement of
our University Library to store and display the
collection. True, I don't own these computers, but
since I can visit them anytime I want to it hardly
matters.
Last week was pretty momentous. We took delivery
of a couple of restored Altairs, an 8800 (now much
improved from the original) and an 8800b. Getting
the Altairs repaired had been on my to-do list
since 2016 when they were first donated to the
collection, but it took years to find someone
willing and able to do the job, and then more
years while he undertook the painstaking labour
necessary to restore the two dusty hulks to a
beautifully functional state. I'll put a couple of
links at the bottom for anyone who wants more
details of what all needed to be done, but let's
just say it took a heck of a lot of highly skilled
work.
After dropping off the Altairs, our contractor
Brent spent a couple of hours with me going over
what he had done, starting with the fully rebuilt
power supply (on the 8800) and the cooling
requirements (mostly spacing the cards far enough
apart so they can radiate heat, but also a fan)
and then moving on to the various S100 cards
plugged into the backplane, including one with
custom ROMs with a monitor and some simple
blinky-light programs, doing I/O with the switches
and blinking lights on the front panel and then
interacting with a monitor program over a serial
connection.
All in all, a memorable day.
Later that week I joined a small group of
colleagues for a tour of the campus data center, a
purpose-built warehouse-like facility dedicated
mostly to research computing. And as the tour
guide led us past the giant and deadly power
systems, the multiple redundant cooling systems,
and the banks of computers plugged into racks,
status lights blinking away, I had the odd thought
that in some sense I was walking around inside a
really big Altair. The fundamentals were similar -
power, heat dissipation, compute 'modules' - it's
just the scale and capacity were a bit different.
As insights go ... well, it amused me briefly, but
one probably wouldn't want to make too much of
it. I suspect it's the sort of insight one might
arrive at should one happen to be in an altered
state, so to speak ("it's just a big Altair,
man!"). But I don't really do that sort of thing
and certainly not at work. Just some idle
woolgathering, is all.
--------------------------------------------------
http://madrona.ca/e/altair8800i/index.html
http://madrona.ca/e/altair8800b/index.html
