Productivity Software On The Altair 8800 (Clone) - SuperCalc (A Spreadsheet)

[@viewoftheforest8955]

My heart jumped when I saw this because I wanted one of these desperately when I was at school. I made a chart and had it on my wall with a picture of the imsai - very similar to the Altair but $400. I saved pocket money and did odd jobs and got up to $30 after some months but couldn't make it, I also realised I would need a terminal like the adm-3a even more cash, so I never got one but boy seeing yours really brought back memories. The first real computer I got my hands on, was the commodore pet, when I got a job at a computer shop. Then the Apple II came out. And the very first IBM PC, such exciting times. Thanks for the video, I really enjoyed seeing it in action. Such a far cry from what we have today, in AWS I can dial up any amount of computers to play with, then delete them a few minutes later, all costing a less than a buck. I wish I could have shown my younger self what we have today.

[@louiealbrecht1088]

We are getting a new computer system in our hospital at the end of this month and we are all going to training and practising on test accounts frantically. As one of the oldest workers in my department at 57, I wish I still had one of these wonderful machines to take in on go - live day as a joke! Thank you very much for this blast from the past.

[@HelenBradley]

I used to LOVE supercalc! It opened up a world of possibilities for people- so much power we never had in desks before. I used it on an Amstrad “portable”! Great video Shrimp!

[@user-cz9gc6sv6c]

i have the feeling that u make boring things interesting :) i never watched a video like that but watched it all to the end xd

[@wa4aos]

Excellent video... Almost makes me ponder running my small business from an Altair. That would be very interesting, Though, I am really spoiled with all of the software we have now days. Thanks for the video !

[@dab1732]

I installed supercalc on dosbox because of this! Love your videos =)

[@psychospacecadet]

You're having too much fun with this! I loved my Zenith word processor with Windows 3.1.1. Well, I am going to look at prices and see if it's worth purchasing❤❤❤

[@JonGilb]

Loving the it crowd 999 replacement number reference

[@luisluiscunha]

Brilliant. Just played a bit with it in PCEm (version 3). Also did some relaxing time using Word from the early 80s. Is is interesting that you could do really some 80% of the stuff we do nowadays.

[@wisteela]

Fantastic old stuff, and a great bit of history.

[@caturdaynite7217]

I used to use supercalc in my first post college job quite regularly to keep track of how many duplicated floppy disks I was cranking out of the disk duplicator. I did by hand for a year and then I finally got a machine to do the duplicating. Quite a struggle getting the duplicator. It helped a lot. I made copies of software and shipped them to scientists all over the world. Job paid absolute shit. But, I got to sit my office and smoke all day and start drinking when the programmers down the hall started, around 3:30 pm. Sometimes someone would have some weed. Got to do a lot of stuff the on most jobs of this type that would be an absolute no go. Did this for 8 years. Left in 1995. Or rather got laid off, the internet stole my job. Ended up doing warranty PC repair and I now I do it as my own thing. Doing work for 25 years solo next August. It;s been and continues to be enjoyable most of time. I have a bad day every so often, as in I meet someone really unfriendly. I do not go back to those places. I send them to Best Buy. As I do not like Best Buy. (That's a real long story there, so we'll just leave that where it is). Back to 35 years ago - I used CPM for a couple of weeks at the first job, to clear the data off a CPM machine to an IBM 5150 (the original IBM PC). The CPM machine got dumped after I had a software engineer confirm my work. I can see why they got rid of it. It was a beast of a machine weighing in at 90 lbs. The external power supply weighed 30 lbs.Very nostalgic video for me. I haven;t used any of this stuff in decades. I found this video because I was watching your 'Weird stuff in a can' videos. I find them relaxing. And I like the nature walks as I have knee and back issues and I get to roam around southern England and Spain without having to walk anywhere. I used to hike a lot around Southern Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for the entertainment and the nostalgia.

[@3DSage]

ok thats really cool!

[@briandenley]

Supercalc was not the first speadsheet. That was Visicalc, the worlds first killer app. People bought Apple IIs just to get Visicalc.

[@kevincarpenter8814]

Keep up the great discoveries you have made.... WIth retro computers and software.....the circular reference is a great tool that MS Excel can't compute ! Lol !

[@allanegleston4931]

this softwere was absoluty ground breaking in the business world as was word star. rumor says that the developer of this thought of this whilst he was in jail. i have a copy of this on my computer using a emulator called boxer for mac os x

[@olivier2553]

Matt Parker and Steve Mould have done something with circular references in Excel to draw fractals.

[@graemecamday]

Thanks for reminding me of my early days of being involved with computers?

[@johndecicco]

You triggered my LOTUS 123 anxiety!

[@AtomicShrimp]

Bah! You newcomers with your fancy lotus 123! Lotus Symphony Sheet forever!

[@bsvenss2]

Hahaha... and 3. 😂😂 Have you had the IT Crowd reference in every altair video. Just noticed it. Great vids btw. Thank you.

[@AtomicShrimp]

I've tried to change the sign to something different for each video (the other Altair videos have different little surprises for you)

[@nogosnoqt]

Seems like this spreadsheet program might be an attempt to make the early text editor style of UI work for a spreadsheet. Wouldn't have been much to work on, so it's a good place to start.

[@AtomicShrimp]

It's quite impressive what they managed to achieve via just a telnet session

[@nogosnoqt]

Yes, it's definitely amazing what they'd managed to do with what they had. Probably a huge inspiration on future designs, too.

[@NealClewlow]

OK, I'm a bit late here, but for future reference, enter moves in the same direction you last moved in - check the character before your cell location (3rd line from bottom) to see its current direction...

[@HelenBradley]

Good catch!

[@Centar1964]

PLEASE more videos on the Altair clone...like Timesharing Basic, Altair Accounting software, and Cool stuff like RBBS BBS software, etc Connect it to a modem and maybe a printer...

[@PandemoniumMeltDown]

Is this device Y2K compliant?

[@PandemoniumMeltDown]

Will you make a Let's play serie on the Altair?

[@ankhi3585]

That ! function is very nice indeed.

[@johnfrancisdoe1563]

ankhi3 I think it's Ctrl+something in one of the current spreadsheets with an obscure checkbox to disable automatic recalc.

[@carpingwithjoe639]

Are you going to do any pc related content?

[@psychedelikchameleon]

Where's the any key? I see esk catarral and Pig up... There doesn't seem to be any ANY key

[@phyzix_phyzix]

That was so cool!

[@joeyfoxxx]

Sooo... The ATOMIC Shrimp finally crossovered with the Fallout games, i'm pleased...

[@pineappleroad]

For about the first minute or so of the video i was wondering how the user interface worked (I didn’t realise it connected to a terminal)

[@whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat]

That's pretty cool. :o Making me want to pick up Arduino again (though budget is the biggest enemy right now). 🙂

[@vgamesx1]

Why is that a problem? There are an endless supply of clones for $2 from China or if you don't want to buy a clone there are even some nice $2-5 alternatives now such as the esp8266 (and 32) which has built-in wifi or the STM32F103C8T6 which has a faster processor, more storage/ram, etc... To be clear those aren't 100% code compatible with the arduino, so as a beginner you might want to stick with arduino but there are budget friendly options out there.

[@whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat]

@@vgamesx1 I haven't fully explored about the world of electronics aside from Arduino. (yeah, I've focused too much on one tool) Thanks for the alternatives, man. I'll look into it.

[@RodBeauvex]

So how does the color in the terminal work? Were color terminals even sold back in the day?

[@AtomicShrimp]

Initially, the control codes would have told compatible monochrome terminals to vary the brightness of the characters, or invert them, or make them flash. Later, terminal emulators on other platforms allowed those codes to be remapped to colours, and later terminal protocols had native colour codes in them (terminal based computing is still around and in use today - usually the terminal is software on a pc nowadays)

[@2.7petabytes]

Its the machine that goes BING!?

[@commonlibrary2]

I wonder where do you save your works? since there's no floopy disk or harddrive inside it.

[@AtomicShrimp]

Because this is an emulated system running on an Arduino Due which has an SD card inserted, there are also emulated disk drives that are mapped to folders on the SD card - the machine thinks it is physically connected to a set of hard disks. It would be possible to connect it to other storage devices via serial connections and such. For the original Altair, users might have bought or built an expansion card and fitted it in one of the slots inside the machine, which would provide communication with external devices using serial ports or SCSI or something

[@LouiseBrooksBob]

Do the LED lights on the front panel actually map onto actual registers of a processor or is the whole machine just emulated?

[@AtomicShrimp]

Sort of both. The emulation is of the original cpu

[@LouiseBrooksBob]

@@AtomicShrimp I see. Thanks!

[@peterjf7723]

You should make a dummy 8" floppy drive for the Altair 8800 to stand on top of.

[@AtomicShrimp]

I'd want it to work in some way. Maybe I could extend the SD card port off the main board and move it into a separate module, then make some mock-floppies which had the SD card built into them.... Hmmm. Might be a bit too much work. I am working on an idea to replicate something that looks, feels and behaves like a traditional dumb terminal, to go with this computer

[@Centar1964]

DISK06.DSK (SUPERCALC 2) is bootable on it's own...

[@AtomicShrimp]

Cool! I did wonder about that as I noticed it has some of the CP/M disk files on it. I would really like to get this thing running a version of COBOL, but I can't figure out how to make new disk images

[@Centar1964]

@@AtomicShrimp I have Microsoft COBOL-80 installed and running on my AD...I used PCGET on HDISK03.DSK to transfer it after I downloaded it off the inet. I haven't coded in COBOL since 1985...;-) Was thinking I might try FORTRAN for a laugh... Just plug both USB cables into your PC and set the native USB port to 2SIO12 and run 2 instances of tera term. PCGET from the primary USB port on SIO and xmodem upload from the native port. (or something like that) You can run Timesharing Basic in a similar fashion using 2 USB ports into one PC and 2 instances of tera term.

[@AtomicShrimp]

I can't get this thing to load the hard disk images - I can't quite remember what happens when I try

[@Centar1964]

@@AtomicShrimp I use the soft controls (ie. Esc Esc and then shift C) and under H you select the HDISK and exit that and then U or u to select the boot (also HDISK) then exit and shift U to boot it. I only have the Arduino Due so far waiting on parts for build with "Blinkenlights". Make a great XMas decoration...;-)

[@AtomicShrimp]

@@Centar1964 Is there documentation on this somewhere? I am not at all well-versed on any of this (including the modern arduino components of the emulator)

[@AllenKll]

@1:05 who else started singing?? Oh one one eight, nine nine nine, eight eight one nine nine, nine one one nine, seven two five......threeeeee

[@stephenchung]

It’s very therapeutic watching those LED blinks, much better than RGB...

[@briandenley]

Nice!

[@bluesquare23]

Honestly seems less broken than excel

[@JasonOlshefsky]

It always bugs me that spreadsheets haven't changed much except for being faster and bigger. This whole "C2+C3" garbage is rooted in simple programmatic computation but wouldn't "materials+labor" be a better choice?

[@AtomicShrimp]

I think you can probably do that with modern spreadsheets - cells and ranges can be named or labelled, or something, or at least, I think so

[@absynth8086]

Yea, I use excel often. You teache xcel what a range of cells is named, and when you use that name in a formula it will refer to that range of cells

[@swot2400]

_Only 90s kids will remember..._

[@AtomicShrimp]

This is a bit further back than the 90s (although the first spreadsheet I ever used (Lotus Symphony on a DOS PC) was very similar to this

[@vgamesx1]

Yeah this wasn't the 90s, we were already using Windows 95 by the time I was just a little kid.

[@louiealbrecht1088]

@@chyza2012 You are absolutely right! I remember it well (well, better than I do the rest of the groovy '70s)!

[@HelenBradley]

Early 80’s I think

[@hanniffydinn6019]

What this actually used back then ? Or is a modern thing with people showing it was possible back then ?

[@AtomicShrimp]

The machine itself is a completely modern (and physically, not very exact) replica, but internally, it's running a faithful emulation of the original, so the experience of using it is pretty authentic. The software (Supercalc) is the real thing. People would have used this in the same way people use Excel today (although there would not have been one of these on everyone's desk-maybe only 1 machine in a whole company

[@hanniffydinn6019]

Atomic Shrimp fuck me, I thought the first spread sheet was visacalc In 83 for apple 2... I’m amazed there was one for the Altair using console.....Impressive stuff... think I will get one, would prefer an original size replica....!

[@Ralph2k20]

Wat?..o I's think your excel is broken? Joking aside this was interesting thank you.

[@hanniffydinn6019]

I’d prefer a full size IMSAI 8080 replica so I can pretend to be in war-games causing nuclear war!

[@ericmdk]

lol!

[@ericmdk]

@Hanniffy Dinn not just nuclear war, Global Thermonuclear War*!!!! =)

[@hanniffydinn6019]

ericmdk these days in a war with America & China.....China would destroy all USA satellites within an hour, and win! A modern war games movie would all be about space war! 🤯🤯🤯🤯

[@spiritupgrades]

Fish

[@acleedsunited]

Watch a man use an old spreadsheet? No. That's incredibly boring. It's Atomic Shrimp. Oh OK, then, I'll watch it.