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Altair 8800 - Video #7.1 - Loading 4K BASIC with a Teletype

deramp5113

7.8K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

143K views13 years ago3 recommendations

History and cultureHardwareRetro computingHistory of computing

A demonstration of entering a bootloader via front-panel switches to load and run Altair 4K BASIC from paper tape using an ASR-33 Teletype.

Loading and operating Altair 4K BASIC using a front panel bootloader and an ASR-33 Teletype.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a clear demonstration of the manual boot sequence and paper tape loading process of early microcomputers.

susamon Lobsters • Recommends

Altair 8800 - Loading 4K BASIC with a Teletype (2013)
9View on Lobsters

jhallenworldon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Vintage Computing”

I like the very early microcomputers where the storage is paper tape punch / reader. Your ASR-33 basically types in your program, or punches it on tape when you "list". You can see some of these on "deramp"'s videos (he is selling Altair clones, but even so the videos are great demos). link to this video The next upgrade to this is something like the AC-30 for SWTPC. It does exactly the same thing, except uses cassette tape. link Then came disk drives, but no DOS. Instead they use disk the same way you used the cassette: link It was up to you to remember which track your file was on.. Next step: file names, but no automatic space management: link You write files sequentially to the disk, and you…
View on Hacker News

HarHarVeryFunnyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ed Roberts created the personal computer industry (2023)”

There's a nice video here of a complete BASIC boot sequence - entering boot code, loading BASIC, then loading a BASIC program. link to this video As far as any program was concerned the TTY was just a serial port, and it couldn't tell the whether data coming in was from keyboard or paper tape reader.
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watersbon Hacker News • Mentions

On “PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi”

The sexy plastic switches on the PDP-11 console panel are not easy to toggle, to operate from the bottom or the top of the switch. When you are flipping through a few hundred words of bootloader or debugger, I was way faster on simple, metal toggle switches. I will try to find a better example, there are a number of these demonstrations on YouTube: link to this video
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u/davelongin r/compsci • Mentions

On “An ordinary computer with an i7 chip sits on a table. The hard drive is empty. You have the ability to enter data in the drive bit by bit, but only that way until you code a small compiler. Can you do it? Is there anyone who can do it?”

Unlikely, but plausible. Unlikely, because Cray was a smart guy, and was far more likely to toggle in just enough of a driver to load the rest of the OS from a higher-speed PPU-attached device. Plausible, because the CDC 7600 Resident Monitor Program was only allocated octal addresses 10,000-12,000 in the SCM. With 60 bit words, that's at worst 61440 bits to input, on a front panel presumably similar to the 6600's. Looking at an Altair TTY load of 4K Basic, the presenter first toggles in a boot sequence to fire up the tape reader (from about 1:48-3:02, or 74 seconds for 20 bytes) at very roughly 2 bits/sec. So two reasonable working days (or one death march) might suffice to toggle in…
1View on Reddit