On 2/10/2010 12:48 AM, lektric dan wrote:
On Feb 9, 9:44 pm, Morris wrote:


It was downright spendy! I priced them (~1969, I think) and suffered
severe sticker shock. It was a couple of years before I could pick up a
reasonably priced accoustic coupler - which I still have.

What's reasonably priced? Somewhere in my piles of junk I've got a
Novation NovaCat. I think it was the astonomical sum of $100. It
should still work, along with the box of S-100 stuff and a Mits Altair
8080. This was maybe ten years newer than yours - several generations
for computers, even back then.

I don't know what kind it is - it's buried in storage with a pile of
other old computer junk I'll probably never use again. In S-100 days I
went with the IMSAI-8080 (but replaced the IMSAI 8080 CPU card with a
TDL Z80 CPU). My first computer was a DIY wire-wrapped monster with 16K
words of writable control store and 64K bytes of normal RAM -
interesting mostly because the instruction set could be modified on the fly.

I liked the MITS, but liked IMSAI's control panel even more.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/