What I like about this video is that it is shown in real-time and not edited or sped up. It shows what it was really like for those who used the Altair in 1975, which was leading-edge computing at that time. By today's standards, its unbearably slow, but in 1975 it was impressive to be able to have a computer that was smaller than a mainframe that often took up an entire floor of an office building.

48K Of RAM! That's almost a new car!

I played that Star Trek game in a Radio Shack store on the TRS-80 they had on display there. Was cool to be a kid when all the PCs starting coming out.

Just amazing, the inventor of Altair is a genious that nobody knows, he should be known as the father of PC!

You had time to watch an episode of Star Trek waiting for the game to load...

I remember old days when you use a stone to store up to 4 kb. You had to be rich in order to buy a stone writer. There was a hammer inside attached to a spring which made small holes as they represented 0's and 1's. They were read by a brush spinning at 50 rpm. Those pc's were powered by pedals you had to push with your feet.

I played this game on a TRS-80 back in the late 70s'! I thought it was fun and amazing that it worked like it did.

One of the best computer games ever. I used to play it in RT-11 BASIC on a PDP-11 in the early 80s, at school. I seem to recall porting it to my Superboard II in 1983 using PEEK and POKE to the screen to make a zero-scroll version on the game. IIRC I managed to get it to run with 8-bytes of free memory, of my 64KB total, comprising 128x 2114 memory chips! Good times!

Ah, the days of loaded and storing programs on cassette tape, I remember them well. It also was a great improvement when I got my Northstar Floppy disk drive in 1978. Now my IMSAI, has seen many improvements, including 8 inch floppy drives and 2 20 MB HD's. Slowly restoring my IMSAI back to health as it hasn't run in about 30+ years.

Good to see people younger than I am protecting these old beasts.

Hey Tim - I'm time traveling back from 2022. I'd forgotten how long programs took to load. The "classic" Star Trek game was fun to play in the day - and even more fun to program as it teaches a TON of lessons in computer programming. Thanks for sharing this.

Its really nice to see classic computer tech like this that is still working today!

I remember playing this game on my Commodore PET and later, on a DEC VAX using a teletype terminal (no screen, just printed the output). Great times!

Man, that brings back memories from my college days. Thanks!

Good lord turning that thing on is like starting an airplane. Thunderbirds we are go.. blastoff

Played that game on a Compucorp computer otherwise used for calculations for 155mm howitzers in the army back in 1983.

Brings back memories. I'm old enough to have built one when they first came out and ran basic on it after Bill released it. Star Trek was an awesome game for the time. Even on my current M1 iMac it looks like fun. 🤣

I always wanted an Altarir computer ..I recall having the 1974 popular Electronics where it was on the cover ..Time went by and i became an Intel engineer .. and never had that chance ..Ahhhh !

Love the terminal. It's what I used for my computer hardware design class. Amazing piece of history and I hope to find one one day.

A friend of mine has a tabletop game called Living Constellations, an interstellar space setting where the tech level is often limited to the 70s or so. Most of my computer knowledge is more mid-80s to late 90s, so I'm watching videos of older stuff to familiarize myself a little more with consumer-level electronics of the time. This video was very freaking cool and useful.

"Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a computer programmer!"

When I was a student at UC Berkeley back in the late 1970’s, my friends and I would go to Evans Hall late at night and play this game with a room full of other students. This was on a PDP 11/70

Amazing to see this computer actually working. Impressive for that time load software from tape. Dreams factory I think And now we have such a monster power in our pockets today with no surprise or enthusiasm.

I always assumed the 8800 didn't do anything other have the lights blink ha

Darn, I was hoping to watch you play a bit! Great video though! In 1975 I was 12 and still several years away from my first computer experience, so these things looked like scifi at the time!

This was the VERY first computer (Altair 8800 and while it seems to be a different Star Trek game) I was introduced to by my uncle in May of 1978. But I seem to remember he had the game on an 8" disk drive. The Star Trek game I played was a 10x10 grid.. if my memory holds up. It also had . . . . Periods, *, E. What memories...

I got a listing of this exact game from my step father's mini-computer where he worked. I ported it to Apple-Soft BASIC (Apple-II) when I was 15 years old. That was it, I was hooked on computer programming and have been doing it ever since. Wish I still had that listing. There was another game listing I got too, it was called "wumpus".

Wow ! It starts like spaceship !

I played this game on an HP-200f mini-computer over a modem using an NCR 775 terminal thermal printer. in 1975.

When I opened the box for my 8800B I got the sinking feeling that there was no way that all these parts could work. But they did. I also had the same feeling for the ADM terminal. Then came the reality that I had no idea what to do with this stuff.

Thanks for the help.

I remember typing all instructions of this program on Commodore 64 C. It was a looooong day

That looks very much like my original setup from 1977, except that I saw everyone using a cassette tape and realized that this was a major handicap. I spent most of my money for a floppy disk drive and went to CP/M. Thus, not everyone in this era went with this primitive setup.

So intuitive!

Thanks 👍

On the program loading, maybe best to use a cassette deck where you can have speaker and line out activated at the same time so you can just hear when the program is complete

We’ve come a long way

I remember playing a similar game on my Atari 800XL. Sometimes our friends would pretend to be on the starship enterprise and one person would be the captain and the other person would be the one executing the command based on what the "captain" said. I forgot how long it used to take to load programs on cassettes. It was so much faster once I got a floppy disk drive.

This is how I got into computing around 1979 with an Alpha LSI II and punchtape on a teletype. Loading Startrek took 20 minutes. Loading Basic a little less. We had 16 kWords of RAM for BASIC and application.

hey, dude thanks for upload! ...your GrauKappenHIppieNerd from chemnitz..

That was an amazing game. Romulan antimatter pods and all.

She's a beast Scotty...

I have a 1980 version of this game that I ported to an IBM PC compatible to run under its BASIC. It had a 6x6 galaxy grid and 10x10 sector grid. Later ported it to compiled DOS BASIC, and later ported it again to Visual BASIC (basically just ran the original version in a text window with a couple of extra button controls). I also saw an IBM mainframe version of this game ca. 1977. I still play it occasionally. At long game, expert level, there are game numbers (random start numbers) that will generate games almost impossible to beat. When you have 88 K's with 6 or so commanders and cross-galaxy tractor beams that can haul your depleted butt into an ambush, what can you do? You can often abandon ship, get traded in a prisoner exchange and wind up as caption of the Faerie Queene. :) In my game, escaping an ambush by attempting to leave the quadrant means the escape direction is randomized--you're not certain where you'll wind up. Good times. Edit: Various versions of this game had different added features. In mine, you can (if subspace radio is still working), ask to have the entire ship teleported to the nearest star base. Because you most often end up as a scattered cloud of atoms, you only use this option when all else fails. In another, the Enterprise had an "experimental death ray." Also only for use in emergency situations. Sometimes it would work and kill all the K's in a sector grid. Sometimes it would kill all life in the galaxy, including you. And sometimes you'd get the message, "DEATH RAY CREATES 2 KLINGONS IN QUADRANT." When the ship's computer got damaged, you found yourself doing on-the-fly arctangents for pointing the torpedoes, and you got to be pretty good at it. In most games, running at warp 10 would, if it didn't blow the engines, occasionally toss you back in time a bit so that you had extra time to kill the remaining Klingons. As I said, good times!

Been playing Fallout 3 recently and I bet the inspiration for the 70s style computer terminals in Fallout 3 came from the Altair terminal! Anyways enjoyed the video, very interesting to see how an early computer worked and great to see they can be made to work today!

I used to have this star trek game on the trs-80 model 3

Nice original hardware there.

Awesome

Holy smokes looks like your starting a airplane

I played that on TTY back in '77.

What is the load speed from tape on the Altair? On the Commodore 64's datasette the standard transfer rate was about 50 bytes/s.

nossa que lindo! nunca vi um desses obrigada

I can't believe you're talking about back doors with that girl standing right there.

So it is just a cassette tape. Amazing!

This is like a sweet old hot rod for computer nerds

Интересный канал, и так мало подписчиков, это несправедливо....

Cool Computer

Hi Timothy, I'm quite new to the world of the Intel 8080 and Altair 8800. I've came to this video after reading Charles Petzold's "Code second edition". He builds a tapered-down version of the 8080 and describes how this computer used the 8080. I'm wondering how did you manage to get the BASIC interpreter to run on the 8080? Wouldn't you need to toggle the machine instructions into memory by hand(switches)? In other words, how did you get the BASIC interpreter loaded into memory? Thanks

a cute computer

Shields Up. Then scan for klingons! I still play this game on my C64 emulator!

I think I played this game, or very similar, on an Apple II :)

I was expecting a raster version of the Sega vector star trek 😊

Это писец просто поиграть!

Like running a player piano in 1925. Like playing a wax cylinder in 1935. Like driving a horse and buggy in 1945. Like playing a 78 record in 1965, Like using an adding machine in 1975. Shall I go on?

Played the same game on the old IMSAI 8080. Didn't have BASIC in ROM though. Had to load it from cassette first, then load the game. You using the Tarbell cassette interface?

I actually played this in 1975.

How much power does this thing draw?

"I'm not going to play through this game," ??????? but that's what I came to see??

"Hey, Computer"...

Why are the switches inset into the front panel?

Reminds me of a commodore 64.

RIP altair

メカニカルキーボード👍

My dad told me about this game

In the late 90s I tried a star trek type game and did it in Microsoft Qbasic. Had a divide by zero error I never could figure out. Eventually lost interest in it.

Thank you for posting 🫡

First PC ever?

Those fans sound like a server room 😂

how did you add a rom to the altair? it boots basic so quick

Anybody remember Creative Computing magazine?

Computer guy circa 1975 " You betcha boss . I 'm working my butt off down here. Say , I'm starting my program now you want to go to the corner coffee shop with me and grab a cup while it loads."

33 lights and not one shows data transfer from the cassette?

Amazing stuff and takes me back a few years, but how is the USS Enterprise going to destroy 36 Klingon cruisers with 10 photon torpedoes?

I'd like to think that there might be a kid watching this, saying "where's the game?"

👍

POV: using the school computers

Very interesting and cool video. It’s a little scary that there’s no indication that the data is loading from the tape. How do you know the computer isn’t frozen?

rule #7 of the computer programmer: wear climbing boots when programming, in case a mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the computer room.... (sight) those good old days!

You can play Doom in that thing

That every other dude: But does it run Doom?

I wished you could have just typed "LIST" so we could see the program

but does it play the star trek song?

At that time it was necessary to have almost a NASA doctorate to use the Altair efficiently, compared with today!!!!

Back when computers were magical. Now they are just overblown Facebook machines.

You sound like John Krazinski.

Woahhh it's a text-based game?

the other hand reads 'false'? 😉

And adults from this ara need help finding the cellphone icon to make a phone call on touch screens

RobCo terminal from fallout

YesToBugMe

Do you want to play a game?