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New Altair 8800 Kit

I have an Apple 1 kit, it was made by Steve. You should e-mail him and ask when it will go back into production. It was pretty cheap too! About $439 if I remember right.

Maybe I should do an Altair 680 kit and then modify it to work with a 6502. :)

I've been thinking about a 6502 processor card for the Altair that would make it an Apple I.
 
I'd say a lot cheaper than mine, but not much less than Steve's. Vince and Steve have two different products IMO.

Vince's kit is great for someone who wants a no-trouble unit to program and play with.

Steve's kit is great for someone who wants the vintage experience of assembling and debugging a computer. I like steve's more because it resembles an Apple 1 and uses the same IC BOM. Steve even matched the capacitor/diode vendors. At the end of the Apple 1 Kit auctions they were going for $439. At the beginning they were about $500 I think...

I like Vince's because you just plug a keyboard into it and with his serial port thing uploading a program is simple.
 
I fully admit that I don't know much (okay, so I don't know anything really) about Steve or his kit. But I do know, from direct experience, that Vince's kit (i.e., the actual kit, not the pre-assembled version) taught me plenty about assembling and debugging. Vince can vouch for that if you ask him about my myriad tech support calls. :)
 
Steve's would not have done that. It does not have a resident assembler.

Steve's Apple 1 kit is like My Altair. Its a vintage replica. Steve and Vince have two different kits completely. Vince even owns Steve's Apple 1 kit! :D
 
Just got this:
Grant,

You got posted on The Register! Cool. Maybe ./ will pick it up too!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/27/altair_8800_replica_kit_on_ebay/

-Rich Dreher
http://dreher.net/CFforAppleII/
Click to expand...

Come on guys! Let me get the next 20 units in before all the free press! ;) I wanted to make the Altair do something cool before it got slashdotted. Like run linux and play an MP3 off of an ethernet network, or even its own hard drive. Something so completely insane. Plus, if it runs linux it is fair game to be slashdotted. :)

Still no word from Ed Roberts. I tried to contact him before. I hoped he would have come to me after the site was up! :)

100 hits a day for a week to the site and now its up to 10,000

I'll let you guys in on a little secret if you want to track the progress...

http://www.altairkit.com/counters.html

Those little things drive me crazy. So I put them at the bottom of those pages, but with a 0x0 size. :)
 
I figured you should be totally swamped by (yesterday now) Monday around 1 pm. It all reminds me of that comercial where they open the website and in about 30 seconds they have 350,000 sales.

I'm still trying to rationalize how to spend that kind of money. If I sold some of my existing non vintage computers, I would lose my *ss (likely around $2000 from what I paid for them) so that's a poor idea. I have a couple of Toshiba A75-206s I might get a fair price on but I have to take them to factory repair first to get design flaws fixed for free.
 
Heh, if Grant had 350,000 orders for Altair replicas, he would have his hands full for at least a couple of years. Of course he would have to outsource it to a factory, perhaps somewhere in China.

To cross-pollinate with the PlayStation 3 thread, whichever would be more cool:

* A PS3 full of blinkenlights and switches
* An Altair compatible in a slim case and gyro sensitive controllers :-D
 
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