Did you get to experience the MIPS Altair 8800

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Not many of us left around. So I am looking for the few who got to frollick in the grass of the early MIPS. I was so fortunate to have a mentor in the field. I had a family member that was a Penn State Grad and worked for AT&T. He developed caller ID. I was 8.

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My high school had a MIPS Altair 8800 and they forced me to use it. At first I thought it was cool, and it was. But quickly discovered I am bad at programming. The guys that were into it are all millionaires now. I would love to see someone thatā€™s good at it show me what an Altair can do.

I can build PCā€™s and consider myself a near expert user of software. But as far as programming, networking or knowing how they actually work at the ā€˜metalā€™ level, I havenā€™t a clue. Iā€™m a driver, not a mechanic. Thatā€™s why I couldnā€™t figure out the Altair.

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Nope, wasnā€™t born yet.

Come to think of it, my dad was only 5 when that thing came out.

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My comp sci class had teletypes and a few commodore pets. At the time I hated it, except for playing lunar lander. I failed the class but I succeeded in getting the lander safe on the ground!

Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to see who could make the smallest bios, thats where the famous ā€œHiā€ comes from you see on the Win 10 install

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I was steeped in PASCAL and multivariable calculus. All I can say is ā€¦ I guess our professors had their reasons. In my case this was 1988 and C did exist. From a teaching perspective I can understand why they didnā€™t jump right on that bandwagon. On the upside I did get the first days of X Windows and ftp with Rutgers so that was cool.

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As for what the machine could do ā€¦ even on itā€™s best day it was frightfully basic when compared to even say a C-64; which was the first computer that I owned. It had quite the following. I was later told by Lynn (who owned it) that it ran BASIC, Algol, Fortran, and a assembler for machine language. He is brilliant and yes very likely another one of those millionaires you speak of. He taught himself Mandarin just because.

Being as young as I was at the time, my enthusiasm was geared toward playing ACII Star Trek. Even then at 8 years old I could see that it had changed the world.