Vaxxed

Hope you feel better soon.

@@Benny_Shill🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

I hope you’ve recovered. Agreed that our KZfaq favorite channels are comforting when sick.

Same here, but 5 months later 😅

That was a nice setup your dad put together.

@@RetroBytesUK Thank you.

Its quite impressive just how much you could do with one of them, and the extra hardware you could add.

@@GladeSwope The credits list Fisher Freitas as suppliers. They got IMSAI after it folded...

Unix would never have run on any Motorola chip less than a 68000-family one. And it wasn’t a Motorola chip that Apple used, it was the rival 6502.

I’ve had this conversation a bunch, having to explain that if they didn’t find the right doorbell and therefore the tight building lobby they couldn’t possibly leave a card for me to see. And if they could leave a card, they could also just leave the parcel by the door.

​@@kaitlyn__LI once had this with UPS who sent me a postcard(!) telling me they couldn't deliver my parcel because my address was "invalid". Of course they sent said postcard to the very same "invalid" address which, as you might have guessed, wasn't so invalid after all.

Yup, Commodore, Atari, TI, Tandy, Sinclair, Apple, and probably missing a few, all separate groups back in the day. Once the IBM PC clones really took off, most of the others started to die off.

I’ll +1 on that hot air technique, I was horrid at surface mount, which made me more terrified of it. I picked up a hot air station, some decent paste, and 6 SMD teaching kits. I’m better at it now, and by “better” I mean “suck a lot less”.

I do need to buy a hot air station it would probably make life easier. Its just making my self spend money on a thing I don't like is challenging when friends keep pointing out all the retro machine that are on sale that they know I want🤣

I’ve always wondered if he got it for Xmas several years before the events in the movie take place. It then makes me wonder, if that’s the case, what does his dad do for a living.

@@c1ph3rpunkhe probably owns a dog washing business

Hey! I still had mine in 1984. I didn't get an XT clone until 1986.

The IMSAI was already obsolescent by the time WarGames came out, I had an Atari 800 when I saw the movie and most of my rich friends had an Apple II. David Lightman the super hacker wouldn't have been using one of these in 1983, not with the kind of money his parents had lol Hollywood always gets stuff like this wrong

I think it's because at the time Hollywood thought all computers were mysterious boxes with random lights that blink out of sequence on them and a real early 80's PC doesn't look like that, it looks like a C-64 or something, a keyboard plugged into a monitor and peripherals. Look at WOPR, it's a classic Star Trek computer with lots of meaningless lights blinking out of sequence all over it. The IMSAI fits this bill very well. Could you have even used an IMSAI to log on to an old school bulletin board system? Download things with Xmodem? Did it even have a disk drive? The Atari 400 came out in 1979 and it was ALREADY more powerful than an IMSAI lol

Thanks for the tip, I'm guessing that's something I don't want to discover the same way you had to.

I cracked sooo many acrylic panels in school. It’s so damn brittle

I built one of these kits too, they are extremely well made. The only weakness is as you mentioned, mounting the back panel to the frame. After I cracked mine too, a little 3d printing later and I have a solid mount. Highly recommend the 3d printed mount as it's hidden and much stronger than the acrylic. I think this is really the only weakness of this kit.

​@@kaitlyn__LExtra fun when it's been exposed to sunlight for years and years. I was once hoping I could restore an early 3D printer. Nope, all the plastic parts fell apart in my hands.

I like that name “High Nibble” ... and his slogan, “For The More Significant Bits”. Obviously nothing to do with anything you might nibble to get high ...

Same here - mine's been in the attic since the 80's. A fantastic machine at the time.

Mine too, I was always fascinated by it. War games probably really helped that fascination along. That and it ignited my interest in modems.

That movie also gave the name to the technique of “war dialling”.

It still amazes me what we can now do with l microcontrollers. So much power for somthing so compact and cheap.

@@RetroBytesUK Yes, its mindboggling, compared to what we had to do in the 70's/80's to get embedded stuff going. Looking at the new Teensy's for example. Incredible.

You never know -- the designer of this machine is still around, although his "wild years" are long gone -- he may be watching right now? 😉

@@kwgm8578 Joe ?

I think he would be more blown away by the fact people can now wear computers that are a million times more powerful on their wrist.

I should give the solder paste approach a try.

Dave is the nicest guy, after I made this video he came over to the UK for retrofest in Cambridge. So I got to spend many a happy hour chatting to him while we drank a number of warm beers. Hopfully he'll get to come over again at some point.

That's really sad for them, I hope they where able to get their lives back on a even keel.

I was the first spread sheet program I was even shown.

@@RetroBytesUK I did a gcse computer science project on if computers or humans were able to provide better random numbers. By looking at the distribution and the mean I could determine that computer random numbers were better than a person, but groups of people were better than computers. Oddly but not included in my final results was that random numbers generated in sc2 under cpm on a z80 were significantly more random than numbers generated by sc2 under ms dos on an 8088. I never got to the reasoning why. But it was very repeatable

Thanks for the sub!

It really is a fantastic looking bit of kit, very of its time, and yet has aged well.

surface mount stuff is so tiny though. very hard to not accidentally short things. also surface mount just sucks. I'm a systemelectronic engineer and i work in maintenance in a company producing cables. and fairly often some part of a machine will just randomly not work anymore at random amounts of time. its newer machines that have more problems compared to some old stuff from like the 70s and 80s.

@@SilasonLinux good flux like Amtech + a J tip on your iron makes even the fine pitch IC’s easy to solder.

Thanks Joe, I'll give that a try. It would be great if that's all the issue is. I could do with out having another thing I need to recap.

Its loverly to know NASA bought some, that did not come up in my research. Thanks David.

Thanks Eric, I going to give contact cleaning that pot a go. I'll see if adjusting it resolves my issue.

@RetroBytesUK on my vt220 all i had to do was tap it sharply with my finger. But i think i then cleaned it and readjusted it anyway. I found the solution in a very old comp.terminals posting

The unbuilt kit sitting in the corner just begging to be built, its so nice when you finally find the time for it. I have a kim-1 replica kit just sitting there still waiting.

Amgia 1000, so an early adopter of the amiga.

The twin 8" drive system he had with it would probably have cost more than the machine its self.

It’s like how Ferris Bueller had an E-mu Emulator, a bit of wish fulfilment for the audience ;)

To put the machine into context, David Lightman grew up as an only child in an upper middle class family. And that family was in bicycle range of Microsoft's headquarters, and Lightman had friends at Microsoft. Lightman's socioeconomic status is confirmed by seeing both parents with good paying careers, and a family home which had en suite bathrooms, well in 1983 that was hardly a normal feature in family homes at the time.

You're talking about a last generation computer in a rapidly evolving market. In 1983 you could buy a Commodore 64 for $300 USD, the IMSAI 8080 was $400 USD new in 1976. So the IMSAI in 1983 was 7 years old, pretty old for computer. $400 USD in 1983 is worth the same as $1200USD in 2023 . So it would be within reach for a teenager, especially one with rich parents. But those twin 8" floppy drives would have been crazy expensive, a cassette tape interface would have been more 'in budget'. While the IMSAI is iconic in this movie, I would have thought the C-64 would have been much more the tool of the 80's hacker, and much more likely to be owned by a teenager, you know, color graphics and games.

@@kurtwinter4422 spot on! Hollywood does tend to base its stories on the socioeconomic class status that they enjoy, not what's common in the world, or even the US. That's why movies aren't good historical documents. Don't get me started on movies featuring music of the writers' era, not the main character's.

In uk the original machines go for scary amounts of money.

@@RetroBytesUK I noticed! I was browsing eBay yesterday evening most are in the US, so that’s completely out of the question with me residing in the The Netherland. I saw one in the UK, the prices in your place are even worse than the US prices. So I settled for watching WarGames instead 🤣But this kit is really nice also not cheap at woeien 270 euros but still better than 2400 quid or 2100 dollars. And both of without diskdrive!

🤣

There seem to be a fair few s100 bus machones with z80 cpu cards about. They made for very good cpm machines.

Not pedantic to tell the truth. It is stereotyping to assume that a group of people would design the same chip over and over. That may be lost on you, but not others.

@@StringerNews1 thanks for proving my point! It all depends on one’s definition of clone; and the 6501 was designed to be a drop-in replacement electrically, specifically conceived in the design phase as “the 6800 but actually affordable”. No one’s claiming it was exactly the same, everyone knew it had fewer registers etc. Being able to plug in the exact same machine code is only one definition, and in practice doesn’t matter much as memory mapping etc can be so different that your code still won’t work on another machine. If you were editing the memory map anyway, it wasn’t that hard in most programs to change the registers or swap to using the stack to work with the 650X. Just because it can’t run the exact code like a Z80 can with 8080 code, doesn’t mean they weren’t both conceived for the same purpose: a cheap alternative for a particular style of CPU. Especially since most Z80 users also relied on Z80-exclusive functionality, so the 8080 code was getting partially rewritten anyway. As far as the chip market is/was concerned, they’re both clones. A computer designer intending to use an 8080 can use the Z80, and same for a computer designer using the 6800. Both can switch plans after the circuit board mask was already made - which is exactly why the lawsuit getting rid of the 6501 occurred and forced those customers to use 6502 with a pinout adapter. BTW thanks for assuming I’m a CPU arch dummy 😘 I just don’t think being so prescriptive is useful. Where most such nerds will go “ackshully it’s NOT a clone” in an adversarial way, people could instead start a more productive conversation about different types of cloning. But I hardly ever see the latter. I considered snarkily asking if that mini essay was proof enough of my knowledge, but then I realised I don’t actually care.

@@kaitlyn__L I didn't prove your point, because your point is wrong! And all the rudeness and name-calling in the world will not make it right. The 6502 has a totally different instruction set and logical layout as the 6800. *They are different chips.*

forgot to say the web interface on this clone was cool...you get to explore all kind of things you would never have had all of back in the day...poeple got to eat...etc.

It would be really nice not to need the card.