A cheap computer for 1976? That's what I built at the time: an Elf. Netronics had a kit called the Elf II that included Pixie graphics and an expansion bus for about $100, or you could build an Elf on Vectorboard using the Popular Electronics articles, end cost about $50 to 100 depending on how good you were at finding bargains. 256 bytes of RAM in the basic set-up. You could put images on the TV, play music if you added a buffer transistor and a speaker to the 1802's Q line, and learn to program in machine language using Tom Pittman's "An Introduction to Programming."
The KIM-1 also fits in the low budget I gave. It was $245, and I almost got one but the 6502's instruction set was so weird it took me a long time to accept it.
At the time, my initial cash for electronics came from a newspaper route and a job at 7-11. That's what paid for my Elf. Then I bought several bushel boxes of scrapped boards with memory chips on them and pulled the memory. I then sold that to get more money for electronics, as well as fixing TVs when I could. A local shop let me come in and help out when I had a free afternoon, plus I was in an apartment complex where everyone found out about me pretty quickly.
I would have liked to buy better systems at the time, but I was forcing myself to put most of my money away for college (at the time I was expecting to have to pay my own way entirely). Fortunately I had friends who often let me use their older systems on "extended loans", so I got to use a Scelbi 8B and an AIM-65.
What would I put on my list? Well, the present me has a different perspective than the then-me. Here's what the present me would choose:
Low budget: KIM-1. Plenty of information from a great user community, open to hardware hacking, and the basis of the later Commodores and uncle to the other 6502s.
Medium Budget: A low end SWTPC 6800 kit and a TVT-2.
High End: At the low end of the high end I'd take a Poly-88 System 4 with 8080CPU, 8 or 16K of RAM, BASIC, cassette interface, parallel ASCII keyboard and TV monitor. I'd also spring for their prototyping board. It was as close to a packaged system with an open design as you could get back then. Graphics, BASIC, well integrated design.
If I was going to spend more than the price of a car, I'd go for:
IMSAI 8080 with
16K RAM, on either IMSAI or Godbout boards.
Processor Techonology 3P+S
Cromemco VDT-1 board
and maybe a Dazzler board if I could still afford it.
I wouldn't want an Altair, I'm afraid. I'd assembled some for pay for others, and I didn't like it. The IMSAI board I liked a lot more. If the Sol-20 had been available, that's what I would have got rather than the IMSAI or the Altair, but it didn't come out until '77 even thought it was announced late in '76.
