billwill
Saturday 28th September 2013 12:45pm [Edited]
North London
6,162 posts
It was nice to see the Altair 8800 serial number 3 featured in the props again. It was on the rack behind Moss's desk and there's a clear shot of it when Jen is sitting next to Moss near the beginning of the episode.
Not a lot of people recognise the significance of that box with its rows of switches, but without that particular box there would be no home computers, no internet and so we wouldn't be talking now on this forum.
The first prototype Altair 8800 was dismantled but that particular one, serial number 3, was a prototype of the very first home hobby computers, designed and sold in kit form back in about 1975. So it's the oldest home computer in existence. The keen electronic enthusiasts bought the kits and built them, I lusted after one. As time went by they were made more elaborate, floppy disk drives were added by some owners and by about 1979 the operating system CP/M had been produced, which is indirectly the ancestor of DOS and Windows.
I'm not sure how the UK acquired this important historic computer from the USA where it was born, but it is kind of sad that it is so little known and undervalued that the museum that now owns it has to rent it out as a TV prop to be able to have enough money to run a museum of historic computers. That's as if The Louvre had to rent out the Mona Lisa to cover its costs.
Go and see the actual Altair box at the Centre for Computing History, which has at last this year gained enough sponsorship to open as a proper museum in Cambridge.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
The web page of this particular computer is:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/179/MITS-Altair-8800/
Meanwhile ... Back to the TV show... I need to watch it again before I voice an opinion.