At roughly $1000, that price in 1976 dollars, out the door. I got the High School Electronics shop teacher to sock his budget for the basic part, about $450 or so if memory serves, and I mowed a lot of lawns and painted a few houses for the rest of the goodies. It was sold, sans my add-ins, I scavenged them back out, by the school board a few years later and the proceeds used to buy some Trash-80 machines to replace it. Good deal at the time, they did more and had a better cassette tape interface, too. The Altair one was always and forever being weird about staying within frequency tolerances on the sound output to write the tapes. It wavered a bit. Quite annoying, really, and a true bugger to fix. (Out-of-tolerance resistor in the amplifier bias circuit, and a flaky transistor to boot.)
The dollar price tag didn't include the 200 or so hours with a soldering iron and other hand tools.
It was the Popular Electronics kit version, with pieces arriving in envelopes when they got enough of them from various suppliers. I doubt any two of these things were close to exactly alike after they got through sourcing parts from wherever they could find them.
I got the expander board, the parallel and serial boards, and the cassette tape interface; we added a 1K RAM board (WOW, a WHOLE KILOBYTE, WooHoo, we're in the big time now!) later. Base memory was 512 bytes IIRC, and it was an Intel 8080 CPU at roughly 1 MHz. on the main processor board.
$439 for the box and basic I/O (the toggle switches, blinky-lights, and the push-button. No there was no keyboard or monitor, you read the lights out.) This thing was a real HOOT, for the time, I loved playing "Guess the number between 0 and 512?"!! Other than switching some model trains around a big train track layout one of the other H.S. teachers had, it wasn't really good for much else... I learned a lot, though, especially when it came time to interface those train switches to that serial interface board. Current loop, anyone? 48 VDC relays, out of old telephone switching gear, lots of skull-sweat and a good dose of luck. A few whiffs of ozone and a couple of really good showers of sparks, too, but hey, that's part of the fun, innit?
Oh yeah, you had to pony up about $4 for the issues of Pop. Electronics that had the instructions on how to put the confounded thing together!
Too much fun. Great Ghu, I'm old. |
