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Altair 8800b Turnkey and Floppy Drive

therealfleen

therealfleen

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Joined
Mar 31, 2022
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4
Location
Midwest
Hello. New to the forum. Apologies if this is posted in the wrong place.

I have acquired an Altair 8800b Turnkey and a separate disk drive.

Both units turn on, fans run, lights are on. Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't know much.

Not being a collector of sorts, I'm interested in determining the value of these two units.

I've included a few pictures here. The Turnkey definitely has additional boards installed beyond what came from the factor.

Cheers,
Randy
 

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First thing (as this is your first post) welcome to VCFED.

I would suggest adding your location to your profile so people know which part of the world you are in.

You will be under moderation for your first 10 posts, so there will be a delay between you posting and us being able to view your posts. This keeps the spam down on the board. You will also not be able to send direct messages whilst under moderation, but you will be able to reply to one’s sent to you.

If you are interested in selling the machine, I would put it on the Marketplace and ask for offers. People will then ask for the information they require to be able to make you a sensible offer.

As a minimum, exactly what cards are in the unit will be required.

Just for your future information, you should have resisted the temptation of turning it on BEFORE posting on VCFED. You could have done irreparable damage by doing this. However, you might have got away with it...

Most people would bid more if they knew what was in it and whether the thing actually works. All of the information is available online for this machine, and simple test programs can be written. If you have the turnkey version though you will find this a bit more tricky.

As a start, checkout http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mits/ and https://deramp.com/altair.html.

Your machine appears to be an 8800b Foley edition (https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/hardware/foley_8800b_computer/). It will inevitably require an RS232 serial terminal and will (most likely) contain PROMs to automatically boot from the disk sub-system.

You could try and get the machine to attempt to boot from the disk (even if there is no disk in it). You should see (and hear) some activity if all is well.

Do you have an RS232 terminal and any disks for it at all?

8" disks are getting difficult (but not impossible) to find - and there is plenty of software archived for the machine. The problem will be transferring it from a disk file on your PC to the Altair machine and then to the disk.

Dave
 
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Set the RUN/STOP switch to RUN and operate the START switch.

See what happens to the disk drive and the indicator lamps.

>>> It will inevitably require an RS232 serial terminal.

Or a USB/RS232 serial adapter and the use of a terminal emulator (e.g. Hyperterminal, PuTTY etc.) on a Windows PC.

It will also depend on what bootstrap/monitor PROMS are fitted. Some variants permitted a simple memory examine, deposit, go, boot functionality.

EDIT: Just been doing a little bit of digging. I think the board on the left hand side of your photograph is the turnkey board (with the front panel and serial connections). This board should have some ROM and RAM on it. The board on the right hand side of your photograph appears to me to be an 88-RMB (ROM card) that may be fitted with the Altair ROM BASIC interpreter.

EDIT: Three of the cards appear to be RAM cards (of which type I haven't identified yet). There will be a CPU card amongst the remaining two somewhere! Not sure what the last card is though. I don't see a disk controller - unless it is external in the disk box. It would help if you could identify any markings on the cards to narrow down what they are further.

Dave
 
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Dave, thank you for repsonding and for the advice. Location added, and, weird profile pic.
daver2 said:
First thing (as this is your first post) welcome to VCFED.

I would suggest adding your location to your profile so people know which part of the world you are in.

You will be under moderation for your first 10 posts, so there will be a delay between you posting and us being able to view your posts. This keeps the spam down on the board. You will also not be able to send direct messages whilst under moderation, but you will be able to reply to one’s sent to you.

If you are interested in selling the machine, I would put it on the Marketplace and ask for offers. People will then ask for the information they require to be able to make you a sensible offer.

As a minimum, exactly what cards are in the unit will be required.

Just for your future information, you should have resisted the temptation of turning it on BEFORE posting on VCFED. You could have done irreparable damage by doing this. However, you might have got away with it...

Most people would bid more if they knew what was in it and whether the thing actually works. All of the information is available online for this machine, and simple test programs can be written. If you have the turnkey version though you will find this a bit more tricky.

As a start, checkout http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mits/ and https://deramp.com/altair.html.

Your machine appears to be an 8800b Foley edition (https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/hardware/foley_8800b_computer/). It will inevitably require an RS232 serial terminal and will (most likely) contain PROMs to automatically boot from the disk sub-system.

You could try and get the machine to attempt to boot from the disk (even if there is no disk in it). You should see (and hear) some activity if all is well.

Do you have an RS232 terminal and any disks for it at all?

8" disks are getting difficult (but not impossible) to find - and there is plenty of software archived for the machine. The problem will be transferring it from a disk file on your PC to the Altair machine and then to the disk.

Dave
Click to expand...
Dave, thank you for responding. I've added a location and weird profile pic.

No terminal options; no disks.

I will check the links out you posted.

I've added a few more pictures.

There are four of these boards:
IMG_5018 (2).jpg

The other three boards look like MIT ones:
IMG_5022.jpg

IMG_5023.jpg

IMG_5025.jpg
 
Just post a photograph. All I would do would be to match your photograph with the photographs of known MITS boards.

That accounts for why I couldn’t find the memory cards, they are Godbout not MITS... Each memory card is 8KB (static not dynamic). I can see three cards in your photographs (for a total of 24KB). You say that you have four cards (although only three are shown in the card cage), so that would be a total of 32KB.

Dave
 
The card in the second (from the left) slot is an 8800b CPU.

Still not sure what the the card in the third slot is yet...

Dave
 
Deramp - good spot. The image I found online of the MITS 4K SRAM card didn’t have power resistor R3 fitted, and this one does, so that caused me to discount it.

Snuci - yes, I was working up to this bad news for the OP...

So I think what the OP has is an 8800b CPU card, the Turnkey card (complete with a disk boot EPROM - and another EPROM with no visible label), a 4K and 3*8K SRAM cards and the 8K ROM card (most likely fitted with Altair BASIC).

Unfortunately, no disk controller cards for the external disk drive. They would have been present at one time (indicated by the disk bootstrap fitted to the turnkey card). So, unless these cards are present somewhere else (in a box) the external disk drive will not work. However, against this assumption, I don’t see the disk connectors or cables fitted to the Altair machine itself.

Now you have a bit more information about what you have, any thoughts on what you plan to do?

Dave
 
Hey, looks like I get to repair this one! A customer ended up being the purchaser and is shipping it to me for repair!
 
Will do! Customer is planning on using Mike's excellent FDC+ as he's already got one in his non-Turnkey 8800B. That's what I use for all my MITS Disk System repairs anyway, since it's basically zero trouble.
 
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