Altair 8800 Simulator

https://s2js.com/altair/sim.html

by robeerob • 8 years ago

67 16 8 years ago

s2js.com

antirez• 8 years ago

This makes me put my ZX Spectrum in the right perspective.

tempodox• 8 years ago

The Z80 is a science fiction luxury space ship when compared to the 8080.

DonHopkins2• 8 years ago

The Z80's nice, but I always thought of the 6809 as the Chrysler Cordoba of 8 bit microprocessors, with soft Corinthian Leather upholstery and a luxurious automatic multiply instruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsg97bxuJnc

rbanffy• 8 years ago

I'll never respect a CPU that needs 4 clock cycles to do a NOP. ;-)

DonHopkins2• 8 years ago

Shouldn't it get confused when you turn it on and off really fast again and again?

AstroJetson• 8 years ago

Very cool, it was fun to play with. Thanks for also including the Altair info, that was a blast from the past.

MisterTea• 8 years ago

Very nice! I actually found a mint 8800b in the rafters here at work during a cleanout. Took it home and added it to my collection. It was used as a PLC to control a machine with custom I/O cards and ROM around the very late 70's.

fuball63• 8 years ago

This is really well executed. I had a project like this on my idea list, although for the Raspberry Pi.

azhenley• 8 years ago

This makes me want to go code a 8080 emulator.

waimate01• 8 years ago

That simulator has an 8080 emulator built-in. It's fully functional.

mywittyname2• 8 years ago

What did people use these for in real life? Were they essentially toys or were there peripherals that made them useful for solving problems?

jackhack• 8 years ago

That's a bit like asking what did carpenters did with hammers and hand-saws in this age of CAD/CAM. :)

I assure you the Altairs were quite useful. Mostly, owners enjoyed the luxury of working on their very own computer, rather than a time-share machine's account from the corporation or university.

It's difficult to communicate how this felt, in this age of ubiquitous computing. A machine that one could reboot whenever you wanted. Tinker. Explore. They wrote games. Controlled hardware. Learned what made a computer tick. Connect a modem and talk to others. Sure, it was primitive, but at the time it felt as cutting-edge as space travel.

If I recall correctly, the Altair ran CP/M, and could run the early Zork infocom text adventure series.

mywittyname2• 8 years ago

I guess the basic model was so lacking in features that I found it hard to understand how people would make use of it. So it's more like asking how people actually used old steam cars after watching a video of Jay Leno spending hours prepping his and learning they could only drive 15 miles between fill-ups.

I did some research after posting that and realized that you could get teletype terminals for them. This makes it much easier to see what people did. I originally thought that most people punched op-codes into that front panel, which seems like an awful lot of work for not much reward.

awful• 8 years ago

All of my college peeps learned BASIC* while running the interpreter. We learned to fingerbone in the seq. to load from the tape, after the tape loaded I don't recall, but we then could get an OK prompt maybe from the BASIC interpreter. We used TeleType terminals w/paper rolls to print, with a tape reader. In parallel we learned Motorola MC6800 mach language on the new Heathkit trainers; our final task was to interface a speaker and play "Anchors Away" as my prof was an ex Navy instructor. *We learned BASIC, but by applying it to data and practical problems IIRC like physics of projectile motion, electrical like resistors, simple databases. Was a Pop Electronics reader from 1970 or so.

nineteen999• 8 years ago

If you're looking for something a little more downloadable, z80pack has emulation for Altair 8800/Imsai 8080 including front panel emulation:

https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/screenshots/2014.h...

Comes with prepackaged CP/M images and can run Alan Cox's amazing FUZIX system:

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

https://hackaday.com/2017/04/16/z80-fuzix-is-like-old-fashio...

Altair 8800 Simulator

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