Welcome welcome! Take a seat! Flip a switch! Watch some blinkenlights!

The Altair 8800 was a kit computer sold by MITS, then a calculator company,
all the way back in 1974. Bill Gates and Paul Allen jumped on to the Altair
hype started by Popular Electronics magazine and called up MITS, offering to
sell them a BASIC interpreter for the Altair (which they hadn't even yet
written). MITS accepted their offer, and the two got to work writing the BASIC
program completely from scratch (without an Altair to test it on) and
eventually Paul Allen flew out to MITS to demo the program. Luck was on their
side, and the program worked and MITS loved it. This is what would become the
beginning of Microsoft and the personal computer revolution. For this reason,
the Altair 8800 is undoubtedly one of the most important machines in the
history of the information age and in the history of humankind itself.

The Altair 8800 was a very simple but aesthetically pleasing computer with its
first (and at the time, only) interface method being the front panel full of
LEDS and metal switches, where users could toggle in programs in binary and
watch for the results. More devices came out for it later, of course, like a
serial card, but the personal computer's beginnings were remarkably humble for
where we are today.

Back in 2018, Mike Douglass, a bit of an Altair-enthusiast, showed how a brand
new reproduction Altair could be built in the present day with all-new or
easily-sourced parts. The new Altair would be 100% compatible with and
functionally (and mostly visually) identical to an original 1974 MITS Altair.
He dubbed the machine the Altair 8800c computer, following MITS' naming scheme
with their own Altair revisions (the 8800a and 8800b computers). Douglas
clarified in his video that he wasn't selling kits like he did with his
earlier Altair 8800 Clone computer (which paved way to the 8800c), just that
he was showing how one COULD be built and in general what boards to have for a
relatively standard machine.

I saw this while I was studying abroad in Japan in late 2019 and got insanely
excited about it. I still had a decent amount of money left over from my
scholarships/grants from my home university (since university in Japan was an
order of magnitude less expensive than in the US), so I decided to go for it.
There had been several kits and vintage computing bits in the past that I had
passed up so long that they were no longer in production or insanely hard to
find, and I knew that there was no way I wanted to miss out on this. I decided
to commit, and spent nearly two weeks working on sourcing parts, boards, and
various other things I'd need to build the machine. About a month before I
went home, I ordered everything, ready to see it all at home whenever I got
back on Christmas Eve.

I spent about two weeks building my Altair, soldering boards and inhaling
waaay more flux fumes than are considered safe in the state of California. I
actually had everything done in I think the first week, but I had made one
small mistake and had soldered on two ICs backwards on the front panel board
(which was more than frightening and made my Altair react about the same as
Kirby when he started to vacuum up his own cord in The Brave Little Toaster).
After figuring out what I had done wrong, I ordered a desoldering gun and once
it got there got the ICs fixed. And it worked! I had a fully functioning
Altair in 2020 that /I/ had built! I got my dang BLOOD on the CPU board
because I cut my finger while cleaning the flux off the back of the board
(which I assume by some hoo-doo stuff, bonds me and my Altair for life). It
made me extremely happy, and it was super enjoyable messing around with the
Altair and learning more about things like assembler than I ever had before. I
was just flat out in love.

When it came time to go back to my home university, I brought the Altair along
to share with my Computer Club and bring something new in to really get the
club kickstarted and back going after my (the benevolent dictator's) return.
And, although I didn't expect it, people reacted REALLY well to it and were
super interested in learning about assembler and bases and addresses and
whatnot. It was probably the most successful Computer Club had actually been
up to that point, one of my friends making the comment, "Yeah all we needed
was an actual computer!" (lol).

And then, of course, Corona-sensei came and kicked us all out of school. I
grabbed my Altair (and most of the Computer Club equipment) and brought it all
home and set it up nicely in the corner with a VT320 and its floppy disk
drives on the table my grandfather's TV used to sit on in his bedroom. And
there it sat, mostly unbothered and untouched since I only really felt the
need to play with it every so often with no Computer Club to lead. Poor thing.

I spent the majority of the month of May on a project I had been thinking
about doing called Sector Disk (gopher://sectordisk.pw or
https://sectordisk.pw). After several solid weeks of just about nothing but
bash scripting and system building and web developing, I looked over at my
Altair and thought, "Y'know, I *could* get my Altair online and let people
control it over an SSH session." I had posted pictures of my Altair and
progress pics on the SDF user galleries before that, garnering a whole lot of
positive attention, so sharing it in some other way seemed like a fun thing to
do! I spent about a day or half a day writing a queue & monitor program that
would allow people to take turns using the machine, and once I had it done and
working, I wrote up a small webpage on it and shared it on the SDF Mastodon
instance. It's gotten an incredible amount of positive feedback, and it's been
super fun sharing it with everyone. I was even featured on a podcast --
Domingos Negros (Black Sundays) 0x07 -- where I went into details about the
project and even answered some questions users had in the HatThieves (the
hosts') Mumble channel.

So, yeah, here's a Gopher page! So long as you're inclined and the Altair is
still up, please feel free to log in over telnet or ssh and try your hand in
writing programs in Microsoft BASIC 80 or even joining for a Zork session or
two! It's fun, and I have links to text-searchable manuals, so please join in
and even come and chat on IRC!

Oh, and if you wanna see some blinkenlights, check out the YouTube stream!
Just search "jebug29's Altair 8800" on YouTube, and it should pop up :>

Enjoy! ~jebug29

P.S. If you like this and want to see more cool things, please consider
supporting me by joining as a user on Sector Disk or by becoming a patron on
my Patreon (patreon.com/jebug29)! The more people that support me, the longer
I'll be able to stay afloat on the vast waters of the net and do more cool
projects for everyone to enjoy. Thank you! ^^