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Working stock REV 0 Altair 8800 spotted on ebay

My December Rev0.

My December Rev0.

Hi All;
Corey, How much Memory do You have ??
I see four Boards that I think are 1K's, but the one with Big Yellow Caps across the Top I can't tell what it is..
And I see one of each style of the Serial I/O Boards..
"" The problem is I use a clear plexiglass cover on my Altair so you can see in. If I ever put my metal cover back on I might. "" If you do Just make it look nice, then having a Clear cover won't matter..

THANK YOU Marty

I purchased this Rev0 back in December. I added a new drop-in Z80 CPU card by SD sales. Works like a champ. The orginal builder of mine died many years back but did a fantastic job. I was waiting all year for a Rev0. There were none all year to speak of. January is the 40th Anniversary!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-MI...ZUTAndsu5aiMg4X3sNwr0%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

:p
 
Hi All;
Corey, How much Memory do You have ??
I see four Boards that I think are 1K's, but the one with Big Yellow Caps across the Top I can't tell what it is..
And I see one of each style of the Serial I/O Boards..
"" The problem is I use a clear plexiglass cover on my Altair so you can see in. If I ever put my metal cover back on I might. "" If you do Just make it look nice, then having a Clear cover won't matter..

THANK YOU Marty

I have four 4K MITS SRAM cards.
The rest of the cards in the system are a CPU card, SIO-A and single PIO. The card with all the caps is a MITS 2k PROM board with a couple of 1702A running a modified version of the Turnkey monitor for the SIO card and also a copy of MBL. I use the PROM card so I can load software off my paper tape drive quickly without risking scratching my front panel with toggling in the boot loader all the time. I have my system pretty much setup for late 75/early 76 so that it's very usable for demonstrations and well fun. I could quickly switch it back to early 75 by putting in my four 1k MITS RAM cards and pulling the ROM card. My system is all MITS except for the upgraded fan which my wife made me put in because of the noise. It was a great recommendation from a friend and is a simple bolt-in and plugin, nothing permanent.

I also have another spare Rev-0 motherboard with 2 "slots" and a cassette card set I'v been debating adding, but I use paper tape so it's really not that necessary. If I did wire up the extra motherboard I think it would be very close to marginal for the original power supply so right now it's a spare. I don't use the PIO since I got an ADM which allows serial chaining (before then I ran my papertape on parallel), so I have thought about removing the PIO, but I still am torn on that.

Another side effect of the plexi cover is that if you do the Steve Dompier music thing it works much better than if the metal cover is on. I've tried it both ways.

Cheers,
Corey
 
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I purchased this Rev0 back in December. I added a new drop-in Z80 CPU card by SD sales. Works like a champ. The orginal builder of mine died many years back but did a fantastic job. I was waiting all year for a Rev0. There were none all year to speak of. January is the 40th Anniversary!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-MI...ZUTAndsu5aiMg4X3sNwr0%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

:p

Actually, there was one three days before yours went up for sale. I had also been looking for a long time and jumped on one within minutes of it being listed. I made a best offer and wrapped it up in two hours so you probably never saw it. You can see it here: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/321610615511

Contrary to the bad phone camera pictures and the dirt, it is in immaculate condition and looks brand new without a scratch on it. The front face-plate looks unused. I repositioned the motherboard and the wires and found the mystery card inside to be a Mits single PIO card. I knew when I made the offer on it that it had no memory or CPU card but it was a decent price.

I also was fortunate enough to find and win this Rev 0 CPU card a few days ago http://www.ebay.com/itm/171643855142 I will remove the ZIF socket and try to find period ICs for the missing chip and the chips that have been replaced. I would also like to find the round green ceramic disc caps, if possible, because I've only ever seen those on Rev 0 cards. The ones on it are probably fine but the aesthetics is off to me.

Now I'm waiting to find some original Mits memory cards to complete it. I do have two Processor Technology 4KRA cards for it while I search.

I do love hearing about auctions I was watching and where they went so thanks for posting, chatin.
 
Actually, there was one three days before yours went up for sale. I had also been looking for a long time and jumped on one within minutes of it being listed. I made a best offer and wrapped it up in two hours so you probably never saw it. You can see it here: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/321610615511

Contrary to the bad phone camera pictures and the dirt, it is in immaculate condition and looks brand new without a scratch on it. The front face-plate looks unused. I repositioned the motherboard and the wires and found the mystery card inside to be a Mits single PIO card. I knew when I made the offer on it that it had no memory or CPU card but it was a decent price.

I also was fortunate enough to find and win this Rev 0 CPU card a few days ago http://www.ebay.com/itm/171643855142 I will remove the ZIF socket and try to find period ICs for the missing chip and the chips that have been replaced. I would also like to find the round green ceramic disc caps, if possible, because I've only ever seen those on Rev 0 cards. The ones on it are probably fine but the aesthetics is off to me.

Now I'm waiting to find some original Mits memory cards to complete it. I do have two Processor Technology 4KRA cards for it while I search.

I do love hearing about auctions I was watching and where they went so thanks for posting, chatin.

the missing 1975 IC maybe hard to find, but easy find newer one to replace.

here is the photo of this missing IC, you can take it for reference:

IMG_9339[1].jpg

The photo is from my REV 0 Altair 8800 CPU board.
 
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Slight correction to my earlier post, I double checked my pre-restoration pics. I had four slots in my main motherboard. It was the second motherboard that I added that had 2 slots I had to put NOS MITS S100 connectors on, they were fun tracking down as I only wanted exactly what MITS would have provided. My system originally was wired up for an SIO-A card and PIO and had a 2k MITS ram card (4K card with 1/2 the chips). The SIO-A card was missing so I tracked down a Rev-0 one. My basic rule for any replacement card is to find a rev-0 version as if the owner of the system when new was into bleeding edge stuff and got the first version of a card that might make the system more useful.

Cheers,
Corey

Cheers,
Corey
 
Hi All;
Corey, You might want to check the "top" soldering, as some of Your pins in Your Picture, look a little Bleak.. Like pins 1, 2, 5, 13, 14 and 16..

THANK YOU Marty
 
If your talking about the serial connectors, then yep they must have had some other wires at some point hooked up, but by the time I got the machine it was wired for the SIO-A and PIO. I could have sucked the solder out, but decided to leave it because I would have had to re-gold pate the connectors. I could have done that, I have the equipment, but decided to leave it. It also could have meant the connectors were recycled. I have seen that before. The harnesses were laced with military grade/telco wide wax based lacing which I'm guessing the builder "borrowed" from work as that was pretty expensive stuff back in the day. It wasn't easy or cheap tracking the same stuff down.

Cheers,
Corey
 
Hi All;
My mistake, I thought the last picture was from Corey and instead it was from Leiy.. So the comment about re-soldering the top is meant for Leiy..

THANK YOU Marty
 
Now you have me self conscious about the extra solder on my DB25 connectors. Guess I'll bring the de soldering station and gold plating setup up to my office to clean things up. :D

Cheers,
Corey
 
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