The sounds of that paper tape reader instantly brought me back to 1974. Thanks! I bet I still have rolls of yellow paper tape somewhere here.

One Saturday in the late 70’s I thought I wanted to play a game of Battleship. After toggling in the bootloader, I started loading my copy of 12K MS basic paper tape. That was 45 minutes, and it came to READY. Next, I started the load of Battleship paper tape. That was another 45 minutes, and that too came to READY. Then the power to the apartment blinked. I then left the apartment in disgusted to do something else. The next board I bought was an auto tape interface. That lasted for about a month or two and after that was a floppy drive system (90K).

I worked for Teletype Corporation from January 1967 to October 1977. For a 'side project' I assembled an Altair 680 while still working there. When the project was completed I was allowed to take the Altair home. I still have it.

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

Does it still work? And do you have it connected to 33ASR?

This is one of the best videos ive seen in a long time

@flurf5245

6 жыл бұрын

Fancy seeing you here!

@enriquerodriguez4524

5 жыл бұрын

@@flurf5245 :why you say that?

This is exactly how I started out way back when. Thanks for posting this.

Seeing a computer check prime numbers this slowly is honestly a sight to behold

This brings back memories of sights and sounds of our high school computer. :)

Automatic program entry!? Truly this is the future!

Garbage collection meant something completely different in those days :)

@chrisbrown7362

3 ай бұрын

"Oh no!! I worked on that program for 18 months and you just threw it on Neil Armstrong!!!!" "Oh no! I thought it was ticker tape!!!"

@andreranulfo-dev8607

2 ай бұрын

Ba dum tsss...

This is one of the first machines I programmed on in the 70's. It was never switched off as you had to load the basic each time it was switched on.

@badlydrawncars6460

5 жыл бұрын

I'll never complain about the 1280x1024 res on my first pc again.

@ThunderClawShocktrix

3 жыл бұрын

@@badlydrawncars6460 640x480 on my first computer ( a mac)

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

@@badlydrawncars6460 1280x1024? Wow, hog heaven! Picture 64 characters by 16 lines! A video display that contained 1024 characters at most. In other words 1K that was a 1K section of RAM that was mapped to a video display. In my case a 9" B&W video monitor.

@joefish6091

2 жыл бұрын

ZX81 256x192

Great flashback. That bootstrap loader was so frustrating, but it felt so good when the TTY was up and running. Thanks for this.

Older than old-school, that was incredibly interesting to see in action. It's amazing how far we've come. As someone whose first experiences with a computer were way back on a Commodore VIC-20, I feel that more young people today should be exposed to this kind of modern history to better appreciate the advancements that have been made that have gotten us to where we're at now.

@Oldbmwr100rs

7 жыл бұрын

Old?! This was still pretty good when Star Wars came out!

@miljororforsprakpartiet290

7 жыл бұрын

A 90's kid like me is more sad over the feel of being so stupidly illiterate, watching this. Wouldn't ever know how to start that thing, the very oldest stuff I've played around with was a 16MHz 386.

@PhirePhlame

6 жыл бұрын

I'm even younger, having started with (and nosed around in to the point of destroying) Windows 98. Once Windows 7 came around, I finally was old enough to wise up to which files should be left alone.

@cavejohnson4306

5 жыл бұрын

I was in my twenties when the Altair 8800 first came out, I screwed around with one my friend bought for his work. I could never figure out how to use the damn thing so don’t feel stupid for not understanding it.

@TahreyUK

5 жыл бұрын

Essentially, "first school". The VIC would have been sophisticated compared to this... instant load up, built in TV output, and a whole 3.5KB of memory free once booted into BASIC!

It is amazing how SLOW it is when computing the primes! Really shows you how far we have come!

got i love the teletype. the noise and speed at which it writes and reads is awesome

Love this. Brought me back to 1974 and the amazement we all felt at being able to load Basic. Hand built. Laughable today, but we were on our way. Thanks for this.

Watching this is really satisfying.

I always wonder to see Altair Basic in action! Thanks a lot!

Imagine going to a friend's house in the 1970's and they've got this loud beast in their garage or bedroom.

Awesome machine. Quiet, too.

There is something so unmistakably interesting about connecting a TTY and a punch-card reader to a home computer with the power of a terminal. It's an electromechanical union seldom seen in our modern perception of computing.

Seriously, BASIC in 4K... That's amazing!

@Oldbmwr100rs

7 жыл бұрын

The Atari BASIC cartridge for the 400/800 home computers was on 4K I believe. Long ago 16K of RAM was considered pretty decent.

@blackgold25

7 жыл бұрын

Oldbmwr100rs I was more or less making a joke saying that the operating system was going to run in 4K resolution

@toymachine4253

6 жыл бұрын

BlackGold Productions I'm stuck at 1080p

@KarlBaron

5 жыл бұрын

Damn KZread, I'm only getting it in 480p!

@TahreyUK

5 жыл бұрын

I think you could get even smaller cut-down ones, though 4K itself was still pretty simplistic, and the 8K version was closer to what would be recognisable from later micros (many of which eventually had 16K versions). The thing is, as demonstrated, it wasn't present in ROM like was the case for the user-friendly computers (even if it's on a cartridge, that's still ROM), so every time you wanted to run it you had to load it in from somewhere - and at first your options were very limited, either paper tape at ~11cps or audio cassette at ~30cps, so 4000 characters would take a long time even though it was at least much faster than typing it by hand or toggling switches - and more importantly it had to load into RAM (ROM carts didn't use much more space than was needed for the programs you wrote and the screen buffer). Which was an extremely precious resource on those machines, this clone Altair may have 64KB but the original base model had only 256 *bytes*, and the first memory upgrade cards for it were available in a choice of 1K or 2K. So a machine with the original memory/CPU card plus two 2K upgrades, once 4K basic was loaded, would have little more than a quarter K to write programs into (really you'd want at least 5 or 6K total system memory to do anything even vaguely useful with the language, a 4K machine was rather more limited to machine code), and had no chance of loading the 8K version. Once custom ROMs were more affordable and started being fitted as a matter of course, or available in plug-in cartridges, that actually made practical home machines much cheaper because they could come with much less RAM and still be useful, as well as the obvious benefit of loading up instantly with no user interaction. Only the working data of a program (which includes the code of programs written within BASIC) needed to fit into RAM, so you then see things like the ZX80 and ZX81 (only 1KB by default, or 2KB in Timex rebranded form), VIC-20 (3KB), Atari 400 and Commodore PET (4KB each), etc. And consoles had even less - the Atari VCS, which was made simply for playing ROM-based games and didn't have a keyboard or usable text character resolution (and so was completely unusable for BASIC anyway) offered a mere 128 bytes.

Awesome. Brings back a lot of memories. I still LOVE the 10 CPS sound of a teletype. Thanks for doing these.

Oh my HECK, how this works is SUPER fascinating to me! And until you hook up a terminal, that printer paper is your "monitor," wow!

My Sinclair ZX80 would eat this for breakfast..... It makes one realise just how big a leap in home computing the ZX80 was back in it's day.

Thanks for this great video. I was unaware how the old computers worked. Was a fascinating time.

im 13, and im into this kind of stuff, and watching the teletyper, I was like "WOAH , this is cool!" I wish I had the money to do these things, all I can do is emulate

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

Well by now you are 20! Did you ever acquire a Model 33? They sometimes become available, but try to stay away from eBay as those tend to be gold coated, or at least the seller thinks they are coated in gold.

One day my friend got kitchen towels (made from linen - the best) from his grandparents. They were in it's original packaging from the 70ies or so and looked (and smelled) totally new. In this package, a small strip of this exact punch strip format was added. Just as new, sharp crisp holes and edges. Every line uses the same digits, I guess it is a packaging list. I gave it to my mom who collected textile industry memorabilia. Miss her 😢😅

@dfirth224

Ай бұрын

For decades the old IBM punched cards ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate") were used as packing slips, etc. Before that the punched cards were printed as checks, especially government social security checks, etc. Printed with ink as well as having the holes punched that told the computer how much the check was for.

Images of common Altair paper tapes are available on the internet. Also, there are utilities available to create Altair format paper tapes with your own content. Starting with a paper tape image on your PC, it's then just a matter of watching your poor teletype punch the tape as you transfer the file from the PC to the teletype.

SO COOOOOL! Thank you for doing this!

Ah yes, I remember keying that boot loader and the long and noisy loading of Basic. I only did it a few times then wrote a program that read the tape and copied it to a cassette tape. I modified the boot loader to read from the modem which was faster and silent.

My father had the Altair #000039, Me, I bought a Vector Graphics motherboard and built mine on a piece of 1/4" aluminum plate. This was the time when idiots were not a part of the hobby. Damn those were great times!

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

My serial number is 739

Rawsome. Something I discovered the other day: silicone spray (for motorcycle seats, car seals, etc.) applied with a cloth does a nice job of bringing the teletype's keys back to their original colour and lustre (and probably helps keep them from splitting). Mine looked like most of yours, and now they all look like your '3' key.

@deramp5113

10 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the good idea!

@enriquerodriguez4524

5 жыл бұрын

@@deramp5113 ,,,,,,

@theodricaethelfrith

2 жыл бұрын

@@enriquerodriguez4524 that's a lot of commas!

It's was a funny and educational video to watch. Thanks.

A personal computer, wow!

Wow, this is both awesome and horrifying at the same time. It must have been costly back in the day to code using a teletype machine as it must have used a lot of costly paper and ink ribbons. P.S. If there is one thing I take away from this is a new-found appreciation for something as simple as a boot loader.

Thanks for showing this 👍

Thank you for the upload. This video has given me a big insight into early programming methods.

chuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachugga-DING! man, I love teletypes

There was something *_really_* satisfying about the primes output slowing down... I could watch 24 hour of that program running...

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing this.

This is awesome!!

its running Prime 95 benchmark :D, its amazing

0:54 Oh my goodness. This guy has a face. I thought he was just a camera with hands that programs an Altair.

Any one else remember the unipunch? It was a little gadget that let you manually add a hole to a punched tape. The PDP-11 boot loader used to work in the same way as the Altair, it had a leader on the tape which was IIRC repeated 351 octal, followed by a byte which was the load address, two zeroes and the loader. I worked out that the two zeroes on the tape were the HALT instruction that stopped the processor so that you could replace the loader tape with the program. If you used your unipunch to add one hole at the LSB end (the 3-hole side) of the second byte the instruction became octal 000400 which is br .+2, an effective no-op. Copy the resulting tape onto the front of a program and it would go straight through load and start.

@richardhaas39

4 жыл бұрын

"Unipunch"? Unlike Teletype the chick toe-punch is still manufactured: "Marks the webbing between the toes of baby chicks." Ops where I worked always had them. They came from an agricultural supply house.

@richardhaas39

4 жыл бұрын

Man makes little holes in paper and despairs (classic): kzread.info/dash/bejne/aXd8qtWdZJnYk8Y.html

That is really cool. Great video man.

I am fascinated by paper tapes.

@dfirth224

Ай бұрын

In 1965 I made the Honor Roll for the semester in 9th grade. The school treated us to breakfast at the airport restaurant. Then a tour of the Weather Bureau office at the airport. They showed us how the teletype machine worked and I got a sample of the paper punched tape as a souvenir. I still have it somewhere. Then we went to the top of the control tower and were given a tour with the Air Traffic Controllers actively working! This was a medium sized airport before they had jetliner service. United Airlines was using their old DC-6 before being retired and scrapped 5 years later. In 1970 we got jet service with B 727, 737-200, and DC 9.

I attended an electronics trade school in the early eighties. We did a couple of units on computers and programing. We used the then ultra cool TRS-80 model III with basic. We also did some machine language programming with a student trainer device that had an early Motorola processor plugged into it. Lost memories of my youth.

Absolutely love this series of videos. Unfortunately, the AltairClone is outside of my pandemic budget but if I ever turn things around, I'll make a beeline for one.

Wow! Thank you for this. How far we have come. What wil the next 40 years bring?

Wow that's crazy! I hope I can see this live with my own eyes someday. My first computer had Windows 98. Yep, I'm a baby.

Thanks for this nice video series.

This is pretty incredible.

Now THIS is retro!

This is unimaginably cool :D

OUTSTANDING!!

Great video! So interesting....

Man...this is cool!

That is so cool!

Doing it RIGHT! :-) Awesome! Thanks for posting this.

I've made a vintage style 8 bit computer using logic chips with 256 bytes of memory and switches for programming, I haven't got it working off a tape but I can load in programs off a ROM attached to the computer's IO card using a small loader.

@ct92404

6 жыл бұрын

william fleete That's pretty cool! You got me curious, I'm going to check out your videos now :)

@TahreyUK

5 жыл бұрын

One would suggest it might be less taxing to do a tiny bit of rewiring which, with a single toggle switch, lets you patch that ROM straight into the 0000h to 00FFh area of the memory map (or however large it actually is) and have RAM start at 0100h (or whatever is ROM + 1), so that the CPU starts executing code from it straight away? Or at least have it be present somewhere in the main memory map instead of being one of the world's few examples of main ROM sitting in the IO space, so the only instruction you need to toggle in to the machine is the three or so bytes that tell it "JMP (first address in the ROM)"...?

What am amazing video! Thanks for doing this demonstration.

i live in an apartment . my neigbors would just "love " this . esp downstairs . chunka chunka chunka .:):):):):)

good job!

"Woah have you seen the graphics on this thing?" -1975 computer guy

@DreitTheDarkDragon

6 жыл бұрын

wow, look at that amazing graphics! - 8-bit guy

so, cpu attatched to the typewriter. i would have never guessed that. Cool machine gun is the best part of it

@dfirth224

Ай бұрын

We used to see these teletype machines in the background on the evening Walter Chronkite news. They had several against the wall, one for each news service.

I want one....please start making these again!

After watching all this, all I have to say is thank you Steve Wozniak

"When the Altair boots up, it has nothing inside it except..." It hasn't booted up at that point!

Amazing!!

impressive !

very cool

interesting! As a side note, you can optimize the Primes program by having it divide up to the square root of the test number. Also, I would append a ; onto the print statement to supress the CR/LF between primes to save paper.

WHAT?! You can print out everything instead of using a monitor? Im impressed

@JohnMeacham

10 жыл бұрын

It's not that you can, it is that you had to. For a long time RAM was so expensive that dedicating some to remembering what is on a screen was just a wasteful extravagance. Just keeping track of a single page of 80x25 text would take twice as much memory as was in the whole computer!

@dzvxo

10 жыл бұрын

John Meacham I find that very interesting. But you would be buying a lot of ink...and playing games......oh god it would print out each frame?! lol

@RaymondHng

8 жыл бұрын

+WindowsLover6767 A teleprinter such as the one in the video cost around $1,500 in 1975. CRT dumb terminals cost double that amount.

That's pretty neat.

OG here. Yeah I used an ASR-33 teletype in college for nu

@davidgari3240

Жыл бұрын

Numeric Control Machining. I could type faster than 10cps (110baud) but got into the rhythm like an IBM Selectric typewriter. Both were marvels of mechanical engineering. Meanwhile the apparently perfectly good Hazeltine 1500 glass teletype in the corner, looks on and laughs.

Thanks 👍

Thank god for ROM!!!

I remember doing this, main point was to upset teacher we did not like in a classroom right next to room with computers...noise was awesome :D

@iisky1

4 жыл бұрын

bstulic lmao

Super!

awesome!

I didn't know this version of Basic was in Ultra HD

amazing. The prime numbers are printed.

Nice seeing and hearing a Model 33 teletype. Spent countless hours repairing them for Western Union in the 80's. Then the fax machine made them obsolete. Took truckloads of teletype equipment to the landfill.

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

What a waste. There is a large group of us, including Mike, trying to keep TTY history alive. Even the 5 bit Baudot machines as well.

@joefish6091

2 жыл бұрын

@@codecage9333 People were saving the newer useful teletypes twenty or so years ago, I vaguely remember reading about it.

Next to mod 33 teletype and the Altair, my old TRS80 was Buck Rogers stuff.

Loading and operating Altair 4K BASIC using a machinegun

i would love a long video of just the noises from that teletype. that is oddly very relaxing

@richardhaas39

4 жыл бұрын

It is pink noise. Lower frequencies predominate: kzread.info/dash/bejne/jIyoy8-hhJDMlpc.html

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

Want one of you own that you can then put it in your bedroom to lull to to sleep instead of counting sheep?

Epic!

totally awesome! What is the actual source code for the bootstrap loader ?

double awsome .

I've always wanted an Altair. I might build this clone, and use it along with my OEM Intel SDK-86 developer's board from 1979.... the year I was born

Windows 9 should be this. Switches.

@troys8418

4 жыл бұрын

It still could be!

Had one of these Teletype machines in the Army back in the late 1960s ! Do you have the program of a Santa Sleigh being pulled by to Raindeer ? Run the deer through again for six or eight raindeer pulling the slay. tjl

Wow ... we ran a prime programm from Microsoft Basic on a SOL-20 on the last VCFe (Basic alone requires 16K) and the Altair keeps up quite nicely. Any chance to do an ASCII-Mandelbrot on that setup?

@TahreyUK

5 жыл бұрын

I thank you for mentioning that because googling the Sol-20 led me on a very interesting ramble through the very early days of microcomputing on wikipedia, including that machine (one of the first, if not the first, ready built all in one micros with a built in keyboard that could just be plugged into a TV, turned on, and be ready for use... yet hardly anyone's heard of it?!), and the component parts like the VDM-1 that also ended up as Altair/S100 plug-ins (thus becoming e.g. one of the first commercially sold video cards, and seeming even to somewhat set the standard for other machines that came after even including the IBM PC)...

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

@@TahreyUK I have a VDM-1 in my very early serial numbered Altair. In fact all the S-100 boards to make it electrically equivalent to a Sol-20. And I wound up building multiple (10+) Sol-20's from kits for those that didn't have the skills to build a kit of that complexity.

Google up the 1970s 'SCCS Interface' and 'Interface Age' magazines, available online. also Byte and PCW. The mid 70s issues are a great read.

I wanna see you playing Crysis on that paper !

My dad had what we called the green and yellow boy.

BTW, awesome man ! Can you put the link in the description please?

And today people moan when their Solid State HDD computers take over 5 seconds to load.

@joshua-tv

7 жыл бұрын

Solid State HDD = Solid State Hard Disk Drive? Did I miss anything?

@toymachine4253

6 жыл бұрын

Joshua Hochspiel hybrid drive

@twistedyogert

5 жыл бұрын

Guess people in the 60s and 70s were more laid back.

I find this video fascinating because I was a TRS-80 Model I user as a kid, and I am now a professional computer programmer. From what I gather, the TRS-80 allowed you to take things like a "bootstrap loader" for granted, as that computer had it in ROM to load DOS, and cassette BASIC was already in ROM, and disk BASIC simply loaded in extensions to make the disk-related statements and functions work. I notice that the Altair BASIC asks for a "Memory Size," which is quite familiar to a TRS-80 Model I or Model III user.

@manuell3505

6 жыл бұрын

I remember being +/- 12 years old, encountering a mystery of MSDOS. What is the purpose of those hidden io.sys and msdos.sys files at the beginning of the harddrive, and why is it "hidden"? I learned that being "boss" of your computer is what they don't want you to be. Gates smelled the billions. Bare-metal computing had to die. It wouldn't surprise me that the 640K barrier was a intentionally designed artificial thing, allowed to keep on existing and push "protected mode", which actually is a situation where the end-user is locked inside a narrated software environment to make him buy more hardware/software. Meanwhile 64 bit computers were already there but nobody seemed to notice the coming problem. At least, that's mostly how it's told...

@codecage9333

2 жыл бұрын

@@manuell3505 The operating system itself! And it was hidden in an attempt to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot! Deleted them and then try to do a cold boot!!

@manuell3505

2 жыл бұрын

@@codecage9333 It was the big Gates scam but the new generation doesn't see it. That's why we're all screwed by Andoid and iOS. The trick is to hijack the physical hardware by locking the end user inside a software construct.

Very gost