In 1977 I was 12 years old. My father wanted to get me something for my birthday so we went into Polk's Hobbies in New York City. This was a 5 story building that had a different theme on every floor - model trains, model airplanes, slot car racing etc. I remember walking through the first two floors looking at all the trains and cars and thinking what a cool place this was. On the third floor, in the back, I saw my first computer. It was an Altair 8800. The front was full of blinking lights. Watching them, and watching the people there working on it, I knew that this was where all the blinking lights from science fiction shows came from - but for the first time these actually _meant_ something, These weren't just trying to look high tech. I watched the people there flip switches and type things into a keyboard. They had a terminal connected and were trying to get an 8" floppy disk drive to work with it. And despite my being 12 I understood what they were trying to do. They were trying to read a sector off the disk but kept getting the wrong sector back. A lot of things fell into place then for me - how mass storage worked, how terminals worked, what binary was, what computers could do. I must have stood there for half an hour watching them while my father tried to entice me upstairs with promises of a slot car track. I never wanted anything as much as I wanted a computer like that, but the price at the time ($600) was far beyond what I or my parents could afford. It would be another two years until I could save up even half the purchase price of my first computer, a Commodore PET 2001. A few weeks ago I was searching the net for something else and saw a reference to the Altair 8800. I hadn't thought about that machine in 20 years, and I did a little more searching to see what became of it. It has since become an iconic antique, since it was the first personal computer ever offered to the public. I got on Ebay and found a broken one for sale. It's sitting on my bench now, guts exposed. Just by looking at it I can tell what parts of it need to be replaced; some of the power supply components were never designed with a 40 year life in mind. Even when I get it working it will be a fraction of the power of any computer I've worked with since. But it got me started on this path I'm on, and I'm grateful it was there for me to find in that hobby store 36 years ago. View attachment 6307
My intro was taking apart a small junior college mainframe in 1968. Tubes and circuit boards. I still take computers apart and put them back together again but they are more fun now as they can do so much more. Good story, good find, and good luck getting it up and running again. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
