
Dawn of the Microcomputer: The Altair 8800 - janvdberg
https://twobithistory.org/2018/07/22/dawn-of-the-microcomputer.html
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dredmorbius
For another dawn-of-the-computer account, _The Digital Computer: Where does it
go from here?_ , by Willis H. Ware of RAND. (1954)

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P608.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P608.html)

(I've been on a bit of a RAND archive kick recently.)

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sohkamyung
That's an interesting discovery. Thanks for the link.

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peter303
I attended the Stanford Linear Accelerator computer meetup in 1976. A guy had
programmed a surplus PDP-1 to play music by entering the code through the dip
switches on the front panel. It created various pitch notesby timing loops.

PS This meetup was also called the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club.

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pmcjones
When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics came out, I worked for IBM
San Jose Research, then on Cottle Road, and lived in a duplex across the
pumpkin field just to the west. I jumped in my car and headed out to buy a
copy, searching everywhere. Eventually I found a copy at a tobacco/magazine
store downtown. The area was called Silicon Valley, but most residents weren't
thinking about computers.

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digi_owl
I find it interesting how similar the Altair and the PC ended up being, at
least conceptually.

Hell, the S100 bus may have been even more successful for a time than the
Altair itself...

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rwallace
Much more so! The inventor of the Altair was unhappy when that expansion bus
took on a life of its own and became a major industry standard, but by that
time he couldn't stop it, and yes, that piece of history rhymed a few years
later with the IBM PC. Appropriately, the operating system that ended up being
associated with the S-100 bus was CP/M, the precursor of MS-DOS.

