Listen along as David Greelish and Jeff Salzman discuss the history of the Altair 8800 and Kaypro computer. Well… at least listen to David’s clear, quality audio, along with Jeff’s misconfigured source microphone that sounds like he’s talking from a mile away! 🙂
The Altair 8800 is a Tier One computer presented as the first “commercially available home computer.” As such, it was chosen to be the first computer we talk about on this podcast.
The Kaypro was chosen due to a recent and unfortunate event. Its founder, Andrew Kay, had passed away. The computer he created is an early Tier Two computer, representing a line of portable computing devices.
You can find out more about these machines on the History of Personal Computing online museum. Click on the appropriate links:
- Altair 8800: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/altair-8800/
- Kaypro: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/kaypro/
Links mentioned in the show include:
- Scans of the Altair 8800 Popular Science magazine premiere
- Virtual Altair (information site)
- Video showing the Altair 8800 “bootstrapping” from a paper tape machine
- SIMH – Altair 8800 emulator
- Sample software for use in the SIMH emulator
- Atari 8800 Simulator (Java based)
- Altair Clone
- Article announcing Andrew Kay’s death
- Information about CP/M emulation
- Zorba: a once commercially available “Kaypro clone“
eBay links (you may need to scroll down the linked pages to see the full auction)
- Jeff’s Picks
- David’s Picks
Send feedback to feedback@HistoryOfPersonalComputing.com – We really want to hear from you by email or send an audio comment! Also, as we cover these computers, we would love to receive your high-quality pictures of the machines we’ve covered, so please start sending them in.
Also, please write a review on iTunes!
You can download the episode directly by using this link: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/HofPC-2.mp3
or, you can subscribe to our podcast feed at: http://www.historyofpersonalcomputing.com/podcast/rss.xml