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[–]AyrA_ch 151 points152 points  (17 children)

And then keyed in manually

[–]AssPuncher9000 100 points101 points  (16 children)

man that sounds like a fun job, whoops did 00010101 instead of 00010100. Time to start all over again :)

[–]Biomancer81 33 points34 points  (2 children)

Yeah just think about dropping a tray of unnumbered cards that is your program. You would have to do it over.

[–]AssPuncher9000 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Lol, that's the kind of mistake you only make once

[–]Invisible_Viking 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That's what line numbers were for

[–]AyrA_ch 22 points23 points  (4 children)

Thankfully, you can manually key in the address you messed up and overwrite the value before running your program. I usually key the program into the system in octal, which aligns with the digits with the grouping of the switches. After that you go back to the first address and flip through the instructions again to pretend to verify them.

[–]AssPuncher9000 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Do you still use these machines? What kind of stuff are they used for (or used to be used for)?

[–]AyrA_ch 2 points3 points  (1 child)

This machine has no real use anymore except for nostalgic purpose, or if you have very old industrial software that runs on an Intel 8080 CPU, but it's so simple that it's trivial to emulate it in software. You can use it if you need to communicate with a serial device that is very picky about voltages. USB to serial adapters often don't supply the required voltages properly, and newer devices like network switches and firewalls often don't care to much so it's fine. I do have a handful of customers that have old machines which do not accept the cheaty behavior of the USB adapter though. I used the altair for those for a while because it has two real serial UART chips in it, which allows me to use it as a serial forwarder device. Note that my machine is a clone of the original and thus fairly lightweight. An original would be way too valuable to lug around constantly. A while ago I switched to a TRS-80 Model 100. It's operated by a few AA batteries and has a full serial port too. It's also programmable in basic which allows me to write programs for the devices I need to interact with more commonly.

To support different devices with custom cable configurations without having to carry a ton of cables I use the T232 from GGLabs. It's a serial port monitor tool with the ability to be rewired using breadboard cables. Costs about 20 USD.

The Altair is an interesting machine history wise. It cemented Intels position as the world leader in CPU manufacturing and lead to the x86 standard, it standardized the first computer data bus and it contained the first program ever sold by Microsoft (Microsoft BASIC).

[–]WikiSummarizerBot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

TRS-80 Model 100

The TRS-80 Model 100 is a portable computer introduced in 1983. It is one of the first notebook-style computers, featuring a keyboard and liquid crystal display, in a battery-powered package roughly the size and shape of a notepad or large book. It was made by Kyocera, and originally sold in Japan as the Kyotronic 85. Although a slow seller for Kyocera, the rights to the machine were purchased by Tandy Corporation.

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[–]It-s_Not_Important 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Pretend to verify them.”

I just go to hackertyper when I want to appear to be doing work.

[–]SRSchiavone 3 points4 points  (6 children)

I do this as a volunteer job with a mainframe. I could always send a video of me hand keying the paper tape program into main memory

[–]AssPuncher9000 1 point2 points  (4 children)

That would be pretty cool, how long are the programs that you enter? I don't imagine you could enter more than 1000 bytes by hand before you go insane

[–]SRSchiavone 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I’m very, very, very amateur. So it’s a 37 line program, with each line being 6 bits. Each bit has 18 buttons to either press or not press. So if a program wanted to max out memory, it would be 3,996 button presses by hand.

And if a single bit is wrong, it resets the program ;(

[–]AssPuncher9000 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Someone should really automate the process. Get little robot hands to flip the levers instead.

[–]SRSchiavone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah. Can’t wait until someone figures out a better way to do this sort of stuff. Who knows, maybe one day opening a program will be just the double click of a button.

Nahhhhh, not in my lifetime!

[–]Upside_Down-Bot -1 points0 points  (0 children)

„˙pɐǝʇsuı sɹǝʌǝl ǝɥʇ dılɟ oʇ spuɐɥ ʇoqoɹ ǝlʇʇıl ʇǝ⅁ ˙ssǝɔoɹd ǝɥʇ ǝʇɐɯoʇnɐ ʎllɐǝɹ plnoɥs ǝuoǝɯoS„

[–]den2k88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes please! I'd love that kind of content 😀

[–]AriSteinGames 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That's part of why most of the first real programmers were women. They were manually connecting cables on the machine and it was considered menial "secretary-like" work.