Digital Computers

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Volumes

  1. Vol 1 Altair 8800 — Volume 1 — The Machine That Started an Industry An orientation to the 1975 kit that put a real computer on the kitchen table — and to the fourteen-volume journey that ends on a workbench.
  2. Vol 2 Altair 8800 — Volume 2 — The Intel 8080 and the Birth of the Microprocessor How a whole computer's brain was squeezed onto a sliver of silicon — and why the chip that resulted made a personal computer thinkable at last.
  3. Vol 3 Altair 8800 — Volume 3 — MITS, Ed Roberts & Popular Electronics, January 1975 How a bankrupt calculator company in the New Mexico desert, a determined Air Force engineer, and a single magazine cover lit the fuse of the personal-computer age.
  4. Vol 4 Altair 8800 — Volume 4 — Architecture: the 8080, the S-100 Bus, the Front Panel Open the blue cabinet and the genius is plain to see: not one clever board but an empty row of slots, a raw bus on a hundred pins, and a wall of switches — a machine designed to be unfinished.
  5. Vol 5 Altair 8800 — Volume 5 — The Bare Machine: Toggling in Programs, Reading the Lights No keyboard, no screen, no storage, no software — just sixteen switches, a wall of red lamps, and the patience to spell a program out one bit at a time.
  6. Vol 6 Altair 8800 — Volume 6 — The S-100 Ecosystem: Boards, Memory, Peripherals How a passive backplane and a published pinout turned one company's accessory list into an entire industry's parts catalogue — and, in the bargain, undercut the company that drew it.
  7. Vol 7 Altair 8800 — Volume 7 — Altair BASIC: Gates, Allen, and the Birth of Micro-Soft The software that turned a switch-and-lamp machine into one you could talk to — written for a computer its authors had never touched, and the founding act of the company that became Microsoft.
  8. Vol 8 Altair 8800 — Volume 8 — The Homebrew Computer Club & the Hobbyist Explosion A rainy garage in Menlo Park where an Altair on the table drew thirty hobbyists out of the dark — and seeded, in a single evening, the industry that would become Silicon Valley.
  9. Vol 9 Altair 8800 — Volume 9 — Clones & Competitors: IMSAI and the S-100 Wars How the open hundred-pin bus that made the Altair a phenomenon also handed its market to anyone with a soldering iron and a better idea — turning MITS's monopoly into a crowded, fast-moving industry, and then burying MITS inside it.
  10. Vol 10 Altair 8800 — Volume 10 — The PC Revolution It Sparked How a blue box of switches and lamps, built to break even at two hundred sales, set the template every personal computer that followed would inherit.
  11. Vol 11 Altair 8800 — Volume 11 — Using the Machine: Software & Daily Operation Once the Altair had a terminal, a tape, and a language, a real working session emerged — power up, toggle the bootstrap, wait out the tape, and finally talk to the machine; this is what that day-to-day life actually felt like.
  12. Vol 12 Altair 8800 — Volume 12 — Surviving Machines, Emulators & Museums Half a century on, where to see an Altair behind museum glass, how to run one on a laptop, and who keeps the originals — and their software — alive.
  13. Vol 13 Altair 8800 — Volume 13 — The Modern Revival: Altair-Duino and Kindred Replicas How an Arduino Due hidden behind a faithful reproduction of MITS's switch-and-lamp front panel puts the whole 1975 experience back on the bench — not as a museum relic behind glass, but as a kit you solder together yourself.
  14. Vol 14 Altair 8800 — Volume 14 — Building My Altair 8800 Replica The capstone: opening the Altair-Duino kit, taking up the iron, and bringing a reproduction 1975 front panel of switches and lamps to life on my own bench.