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

[@kevinforth7618]

The sounds of that paper tape reader instantly brought me back to 1974. Thanks! I bet I still have rolls of yellow paper tape somewhere here.

[@Ed_Stuckey]

I worked for Teletype Corporation from January 1967 to October 1977. For a 'side project' I assembled an Altair 680 while still working there. When the project was completed I was allowed to take the Altair home. I still have it.

[@codecage9333]

Does it still work? And do you have it connected to 33ASR?

[@obsoletegeek]

This is one of the best videos ive seen in a long time

[@flurf5245]

Fancy seeing you here!

[@enriquerodriguez4524]

@@flurf5245 :why you say that?

[@samsmith1580]

This is one of the first machines I programmed on in the 70's. It was never switched off as you had to load the basic each time it was switched on.

[@badlydrawncars6460]

I'll never complain about the 1280x1024 res on my first pc again.

[@ThunderClawShocktrix]

@@badlydrawncars6460 640x480 on my first computer ( a mac)

[@codecage9333]

@@badlydrawncars6460 1280x1024? Wow, hog heaven! Picture 64 characters by 16 lines! A video display that contained 1024 characters at most. In other words 1K that was a 1K section of RAM that was mapped to a video display. In my case a 9" B&W video monitor.

[@joefish6091]

ZX81 256x192

[@geertvanbommel3072]

Garbage collection meant something completely different in those days :)

[@chrisbrown7362]

"Oh no!! I worked on that program for 18 months and you just threw it on Neil Armstrong!!!!" "Oh no! I thought it was ticker tape!!!"

[@andreranulfo-dev8607]

Ba dum tsss...

[@robintst]

Older than old-school, that was incredibly interesting to see in action. It's amazing how far we've come. As someone whose first experiences with a computer were way back on a Commodore VIC-20, I feel that more young people today should be exposed to this kind of modern history to better appreciate the advancements that have been made that have gotten us to where we're at now.

[@Oldbmwr100rs]

Old?! This was still pretty good when Star Wars came out!

[@miljororforsprakpartiet290]

A 90's kid like me is more sad over the feel of being so stupidly illiterate, watching this. Wouldn't ever know how to start that thing, the very oldest stuff I've played around with was a 16MHz 386.

[@PhirePhlame]

I'm even younger, having started with (and nosed around in to the point of destroying) Windows 98. Once Windows 7 came around, I finally was old enough to wise up to which files should be left alone.

[@cavejohnson4306]

I was in my twenties when the Altair 8800 first came out, I screwed around with one my friend bought for his work. I could never figure out how to use the damn thing so don’t feel stupid for not understanding it.

[@TahreyUK]

Essentially, "first school". The VIC would have been sophisticated compared to this... instant load up, built in TV output, and a whole 3.5KB of memory free once booted into BASIC!

[@idonotknowme]

Automatic program entry!? Truly this is the future!

[@dbeach4044]

Great flashback. That bootstrap loader was so frustrating, but it felt so good when the TTY was up and running. Thanks for this.

[@Fingrek]

Seeing a computer check prime numbers this slowly is honestly a sight to behold

[@dbeach4044]

Love this. Brought me back to 1974 and the amazement we all felt at being able to load Basic. Hand built. Laughable today, but we were on our way. Thanks for this.

[@deramp5113]

Images of common Altair paper tapes are available on the internet. Also, there are utilities available to create Altair format paper tapes with your own content. Starting with a paper tape image on your PC, it's then just a matter of watching your poor teletype punch the tape as you transfer the file from the PC to the teletype.

[@wrongmouse1658]

One Saturday in the late 70’s I thought I wanted to play a game of Battleship. After toggling in the bootloader, I started loading my copy of 12K MS basic paper tape. That was 45 minutes, and it came to READY. Next, I started the load of Battleship paper tape. That was another 45 minutes, and that too came to READY. Then the power to the apartment blinked. I then left the apartment in disgusted to do something else. The next board I bought was an auto tape interface. That lasted for about a month or two and after that was a floppy drive system (90K).

[@proxy1035]

got i love the teletype. the noise and speed at which it writes and reads is awesome

[@rshaddock]

This brings back memories of sights and sounds of our high school computer. :)

[@randomexcessmemories4452]

It is amazing how SLOW it is when computing the primes! Really shows you how far we have come!

[@ADHJkvsNgsMBbTQe]

This is exactly how I started out way back when. Thanks for posting this.

[@gustavgnoettgen]

One day my friend got kitchen towels (made from linen - the best) from his grandparents. They were in it's original packaging from the 70ies or so and looked (and smelled) totally new. In this package, a small strip of this exact punch strip format was added. Just as new, sharp crisp holes and edges. Every line uses the same digits, I guess it is a packaging list. I gave it to my mom who collected textile industry memorabilia. Miss her 😢😅

[@dfirth224]

For decades the old IBM punched cards ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate") were used as packing slips, etc. Before that the punched cards were printed as checks, especially government social security checks, etc. Printed with ink as well as having the holes punched that told the computer how much the check was for.

[@theodricaethelfrith]

Rawsome. Something I discovered the other day: silicone spray (for motorcycle seats, car seals, etc.) applied with a cloth does a nice job of bringing the teletype's keys back to their original colour and lustre (and probably helps keep them from splitting). Mine looked like most of yours, and now they all look like your '3' key.

[@deramp5113]

Thanks for the good idea!

[@enriquerodriguez4524]

@@deramp5113 ,,,,,,

[@theodricaethelfrith]

@@enriquerodriguez4524 that's a lot of commas!

[@njsynthesis]

There is something so unmistakably interesting about connecting a TTY and a punch-card reader to a home computer with the power of a terminal. It's an electromechanical union seldom seen in our modern perception of computing.

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

Oh my HECK, how this works is SUPER fascinating to me! And until you hook up a terminal, that printer paper is your "monitor," wow!

[@andreranulfo-dev8607]

I always wonder to see Altair Basic in action! Thanks a lot!

[@chemergency]

Imagine going to a friend's house in the 1970's and they've got this loud beast in their garage or bedroom.

[@JohnAK72]

Watching this is really satisfying.

[@Rowsdow3r]

Awesome machine. Quiet, too.

[@popper666]

Awesome. Brings back a lot of memories. I still LOVE the 10 CPS sound of a teletype. Thanks for doing these.

[@blackgold25]

Seriously, BASIC in 4K... That's amazing!

[@Oldbmwr100rs]

The Atari BASIC cartridge for the 400/800 home computers was on 4K I believe. Long ago 16K of RAM was considered pretty decent.

[@blackgold25]

Oldbmwr100rs I was more or less making a joke saying that the operating system was going to run in 4K resolution

[@toymachine4253]

BlackGold Productions I'm stuck at 1080p

[@KarlBaron]

Damn KZbin, I'm only getting it in 480p!

[@TahreyUK]

I think you could get even smaller cut-down ones, though 4K itself was still pretty simplistic, and the 8K version was closer to what would be recognisable from later micros (many of which eventually had 16K versions). The thing is, as demonstrated, it wasn't present in ROM like was the case for the user-friendly computers (even if it's on a cartridge, that's still ROM), so every time you wanted to run it you had to load it in from somewhere - and at first your options were very limited, either paper tape at ~11cps or audio cassette at ~30cps, so 4000 characters would take a long time even though it was at least much faster than typing it by hand or toggling switches - and more importantly it had to load into RAM (ROM carts didn't use much more space than was needed for the programs you wrote and the screen buffer). Which was an extremely precious resource on those machines, this clone Altair may have 64KB but the original base model had only 256 *bytes*, and the first memory upgrade cards for it were available in a choice of 1K or 2K. So a machine with the original memory/CPU card plus two 2K upgrades, once 4K basic was loaded, would have little more than a quarter K to write programs into (really you'd want at least 5 or 6K total system memory to do anything even vaguely useful with the language, a 4K machine was rather more limited to machine code), and had no chance of loading the 8K version. Once custom ROMs were more affordable and started being fitted as a matter of course, or available in plug-in cartridges, that actually made practical home machines much cheaper because they could come with much less RAM and still be useful, as well as the obvious benefit of loading up instantly with no user interaction. Only the working data of a program (which includes the code of programs written within BASIC) needed to fit into RAM, so you then see things like the ZX80 and ZX81 (only 1KB by default, or 2KB in Timex rebranded form), VIC-20 (3KB), Atari 400 and Commodore PET (4KB each), etc. And consoles had even less - the Atari VCS, which was made simply for playing ROM-based games and didn't have a keyboard or usable text character resolution (and so was completely unusable for BASIC anyway) offered a mere 128 bytes.

[@kennethrichter24]

Thanks for this great video. I was unaware how the old computers worked. Was a fascinating time.

[@ShubhankarDolas]

so, cpu attatched to the typewriter. i would have never guessed that. Cool machine gun is the best part of it

[@dfirth224]

We used to see these teletype machines in the background on the evening Walter Chronkite news. They had several against the wall, one for each news service.

[@richardhole8429]

Ah yes, I remember keying that boot loader and the long and noisy loading of Basic. I only did it a few times then wrote a program that read the tape and copied it to a cassette tape. I modified the boot loader to read from the modem which was faster and silent.

[@HazelTheHare]

0:54 Oh my goodness. This guy has a face. I thought he was just a camera with hands that programs an Altair.

[@robertbilling6266]

Any one else remember the unipunch? It was a little gadget that let you manually add a hole to a punched tape. The PDP-11 boot loader used to work in the same way as the Altair, it had a leader on the tape which was IIRC repeated 351 octal, followed by a byte which was the load address, two zeroes and the loader. I worked out that the two zeroes on the tape were the HALT instruction that stopped the processor so that you could replace the loader tape with the program. If you used your unipunch to add one hole at the LSB end (the 3-hole side) of the second byte the instruction became octal 000400 which is br .+2, an effective no-op. Copy the resulting tape onto the front of a program and it would go straight through load and start.

[@richardhaas39]

"Unipunch"? Unlike Teletype the chick toe-punch is still manufactured: "Marks the webbing between the toes of baby chicks." Ops where I worked always had them. They came from an agricultural supply house.

[@richardhaas39]

Man makes little holes in paper and despairs (classic): kzbin.info/www/bejne/bXSreaaaaZulmcU

[@jimtaylor201]

Wow, this is both awesome and horrifying at the same time. It must have been costly back in the day to code using a teletype machine as it must have used a lot of costly paper and ink ribbons. P.S. If there is one thing I take away from this is a new-found appreciation for something as simple as a boot loader.

[@grendelum]

There was something *_really_* satisfying about the primes output slowing down... I could watch 24 hour of that program running...

[@rcworks9762]

My father had the Altair #000039, Me, I bought a Vector Graphics motherboard and built mine on a piece of 1/4" aluminum plate. This was the time when idiots were not a part of the hobby. Damn those were great times!

[@codecage9333]

My serial number is 739

[@quenjankosky7348]

im 13, and im into this kind of stuff, and watching the teletyper, I was like "WOAH , this is cool!" I wish I had the money to do these things, all I can do is emulate

[@codecage9333]

Well by now you are 20! Did you ever acquire a Model 33? They sometimes become available, but try to stay away from eBay as those tend to be gold coated, or at least the seller thinks they are coated in gold.

[@davidmicka4333]

its running Prime 95 benchmark :D, its amazing

[@CZ350tuner]

My Sinclair ZX80 would eat this for breakfast..... It makes one realise just how big a leap in home computing the ZX80 was back in it's day.

[@Lethgar_Smith]

I attended an electronics trade school in the early eighties. We did a couple of units on computers and programing. We used the then ultra cool TRS-80 model III with basic. We also did some machine language programming with a student trainer device that had an early Motorola processor plugged into it. Lost memories of my youth.

[@williefleete]

I've made a vintage style 8 bit computer using logic chips with 256 bytes of memory and switches for programming, I haven't got it working off a tape but I can load in programs off a ROM attached to the computer's IO card using a small loader.

[@ct6502-c7w]

william fleete That's pretty cool! You got me curious, I'm going to check out your videos now :)

[@TahreyUK]

One would suggest it might be less taxing to do a tiny bit of rewiring which, with a single toggle switch, lets you patch that ROM straight into the 0000h to 00FFh area of the memory map (or however large it actually is) and have RAM start at 0100h (or whatever is ROM + 1), so that the CPU starts executing code from it straight away? Or at least have it be present somewhere in the main memory map instead of being one of the world's few examples of main ROM sitting in the IO space, so the only instruction you need to toggle in to the machine is the three or so bytes that tell it "JMP (first address in the ROM)"...?

[@MrKylePopovich]

SO COOOOOL! Thank you for doing this!

[@namernum5692]

A personal computer, wow!

[@crossfire679]

Thanks for showing this 👍

[@ChrisPollitt]

Wow! Thank you for this. How far we have come. What wil the next 40 years bring?

[@antonnym214]

interesting! As a side note, you can optimize the Primes program by having it divide up to the square root of the test number. Also, I would append a ; onto the print statement to supress the CR/LF between primes to save paper.

[@ninoporcino5790]

totally awesome! What is the actual source code for the bootstrap loader ?

[@cyberx1254]

This is awesome!!

[@la_fanjo]

Wow that's crazy! I hope I can see this live with my own eyes someday. My first computer had Windows 98. Yep, I'm a baby.

[@hongkongcantonese501]

Absolutely love this series of videos. Unfortunately, the AltairClone is outside of my pandemic budget but if I ever turn things around, I'll make a beeline for one.

[@varganyamuvek]

I am fascinated by paper tapes.

[@dfirth224]

In 1965 I made the Honor Roll for the semester in 9th grade. The school treated us to breakfast at the airport restaurant. Then a tour of the Weather Bureau office at the airport. They showed us how the teletype machine worked and I got a sample of the paper punched tape as a souvenir. I still have it somewhere. Then we went to the top of the control tower and were given a tour with the Air Traffic Controllers actively working! This was a medium sized airport before they had jetliner service. United Airlines was using their old DC-6 before being retired and scrapped 5 years later. In 1970 we got jet service with B 727, 737-200, and DC 9.

[@1337Shockwav3]

Wow ... we ran a prime programm from Microsoft Basic on a SOL-20 on the last VCFe (Basic alone requires 16K) and the Altair keeps up quite nicely. Any chance to do an ASCII-Mandelbrot on that setup?

[@TahreyUK]

I thank you for mentioning that because googling the Sol-20 led me on a very interesting ramble through the very early days of microcomputing on wikipedia, including that machine (one of the first, if not the first, ready built all in one micros with a built in keyboard that could just be plugged into a TV, turned on, and be ready for use... yet hardly anyone's heard of it?!), and the component parts like the VDM-1 that also ended up as Altair/S100 plug-ins (thus becoming e.g. one of the first commercially sold video cards, and seeming even to somewhat set the standard for other machines that came after even including the IBM PC)...

[@codecage9333]

@@TahreyUK I have a VDM-1 in my very early serial numbered Altair. In fact all the S-100 boards to make it electrically equivalent to a Sol-20. And I wound up building multiple (10+) Sol-20's from kits for those that didn't have the skills to build a kit of that complexity.

[@ScienceAppliedForGood]

It's was a funny and educational video to watch. Thanks.

[@dzvxo]

WHAT?! You can print out everything instead of using a monitor? Im impressed

[@JohnMeacham]

It's not that you can, it is that you had to. For a long time RAM was so expensive that dedicating some to remembering what is on a screen was just a wasteful extravagance. Just keeping track of a single page of 80x25 text would take twice as much memory as was in the whole computer!

[@dzvxo]

John Meacham I find that very interesting. But you would be buying a lot of ink...and playing games......oh god it would print out each frame?! lol

[@RaymondHng]

+WindowsLover6767 A teleprinter such as the one in the video cost around $1,500 in 1975. CRT dumb terminals cost double that amount.

[@gatorhand]

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing this.

[@stevenbennett3805]

Next to mod 33 teletype and the Altair, my old TRS80 was Buck Rogers stuff.

[@pauliexcluded1]

I want one....please start making these again!

[@jeopardy60611]

I find this video fascinating because I was a TRS-80 Model I user as a kid, and I am now a professional computer programmer. From what I gather, the TRS-80 allowed you to take things like a "bootstrap loader" for granted, as that computer had it in ROM to load DOS, and cassette BASIC was already in ROM, and disk BASIC simply loaded in extensions to make the disk-related statements and functions work. I notice that the Altair BASIC asks for a "Memory Size," which is quite familiar to a TRS-80 Model I or Model III user.

[@manuell3505]

I remember being +/- 12 years old, encountering a mystery of MSDOS. What is the purpose of those hidden io.sys and msdos.sys files at the beginning of the harddrive, and why is it "hidden"? I learned that being "boss" of your computer is what they don't want you to be. Gates smelled the billions. Bare-metal computing had to die. It wouldn't surprise me that the 640K barrier was a intentionally designed artificial thing, allowed to keep on existing and push "protected mode", which actually is a situation where the end-user is locked inside a narrated software environment to make him buy more hardware/software. Meanwhile 64 bit computers were already there but nobody seemed to notice the coming problem. At least, that's mostly how it's told...

[@codecage9333]

@@manuell3505 The operating system itself! And it was hidden in an attempt to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot! Deleted them and then try to do a cold boot!!

[@manuell3505]

@@codecage9333 It was the big Gates scam but the new generation doesn't see it. That's why we're all screwed by Andoid and iOS. The trick is to hijack the physical hardware by locking the end user inside a software construct.

[@drnapster]

i would love a long video of just the noises from that teletype. that is oddly very relaxing

[@richardhaas39]

It is pink noise. Lower frequencies predominate: kzbin.info/www/bejne/kInXmqCeiZKZnJY

[@codecage9333]

Want one of you own that you can then put it in your bedroom to lull to to sleep instead of counting sheep?

[@timlipinski2571]

Had one of these Teletype machines in the Army back in the late 1960s ! Do you have the program of a Santa Sleigh being pulled by to Raindeer ? Run the deer through again for six or eight raindeer pulling the slay. tjl

[@thecooldude9999]

chuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachugga-DING! man, I love teletypes

[@rubikbrewer]

BTW, awesome man ! Can you put the link in the description please?

[@ironking76]

Nice seeing and hearing a Model 33 teletype. Spent countless hours repairing them for Western Union in the 80's. Then the fax machine made them obsolete. Took truckloads of teletype equipment to the landfill.

[@codecage9333]

What a waste. There is a large group of us, including Mike, trying to keep TTY history alive. Even the 5 bit Baudot machines as well.

[@joefish6091]

@@codecage9333 People were saving the newer useful teletypes twenty or so years ago, I vaguely remember reading about it.

[@signorelephant]

Why would a vintage Altair be damaged if it got hooked up to a teletype machine, as mentioned at the end of your video?

[@dylawarnasaurus]

"Woah have you seen the graphics on this thing?" -1975 computer guy

[@DreitTheDarkDragon]

wow, look at that amazing graphics! - 8-bit guy

[@MrFaceHead]

Windows 9 should be this. Switches.

[@troys8418]

It still could be!

[@TahreyUK]

I guess the 110 baud teletype rate is why serial ports and modems still support that rate into the modern day?

[@joefish6091]

Google up the 1970s 'SCCS Interface' and 'Interface Age' magazines, available online. also Byte and PCW. The mid 70s issues are a great read.

[@TahreyUK]

Hold on, the second byte was 256? How does that work? Anyway, having seen this and the EDSAC rebuilding videos (specifically in this case the "initial orders" one), I'm wondering if any Altair user might have gone to the trouble of making a cam-like rotary encoder device that would electromechanically toggle in the bootstrap bytes when you turned the handle, if they couldn't afford to get a bootstrap ROM board but did have the necessary physical parts available. It seems like there's only a couple dozen bytes to program in so it wouldn't have been too intricate a device to build. Maybe even just a linear track and comb affair would have done the job. Might have been a bit of a project, but if you were trying to run or program something that frequently hit errors that crashed the machine and forced you to reboot it might well have been worth it...

[@ericbowen650]

MITS documented their bootloaders and other front panel programs in octal. 256 in octal is 174 in decimal, or AE in hex, or 10101110 in binary.

[@mrfuzzer1]

That is really cool. Great video man.

[@rubikbrewer]

I've always wanted an Altair. I might build this clone, and use it along with my OEM Intel SDK-86 developer's board from 1979.... the year I was born

[@edgeeffect]

Be nice if you did a split-screen with the Altair front panel on one side and the tape reader on the other side.

[@xiaochicash]

After watching all this, all I have to say is thank you Steve Wozniak

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

"When the Altair boots up, it has nothing inside it except..." It hasn't booted up at that point!

[@antihumor2231]

I didn't know this version of Basic was in Ultra HD

[@铜羅衛門]

why did it take that long to print prime numbers? was it because of the BASIC interpreter?

[@RaymondHng]

+Spooky Calogyne Because it was an interpreted language and the Intel 8080 was an 8-bit microprocessor with an 2 MHz clock rate.

[@johnstahlman9767]

I can only imagine playing zork on the altair with a teletype

[@jimharris9394]

Is it possible to: 1. Get information on exactly what hardware was used (boards, etc.), and how it was connected. 2. Get raw binary images of the tapes for things like the 4k and 8k Basic. (Plus any other software)

[@scottlarson1548]

Did I see that this thing has *64K* of memory? In the 70's I was soldering chips just to get 16K of RAM in my computer and I didn't even know how to use it all.

[@codecage9333]

The FIRST 2MB S-100 memory board, made by Cromemco around 1986, retailed for $6995. And that "." (period) wasn't just at the end of the sentence, but was also the decimal point in the dollar amount!

[@murayamamikio]

amazing. The prime numbers are printed.

[@ElysiumNZ]

And today people moan when their Solid State HDD computers take over 5 seconds to load.

[@joshua-tv]

Solid State HDD = Solid State Hard Disk Drive? Did I miss anything?

[@toymachine4253]

Joshua Hochspiel hybrid drive

[@twistedyogert]

Guess people in the 60s and 70s were more laid back.

[@WinrichNaujoks]

How often could you do this before the tape conks out?

[@TahreyUK]

Paper tape is actually fairly robust, often it was laminated with a thin film of plastic to make it slide more easily and protect against tears. Generally it's a write-once medium (about the only editing you can do, outside of cutting and splicing, is to immediately overstrike an erroneous character or section with one or more full 5-hole codes which signified "null" and would then be ignored by the receiver), essentially read-only once prepared, so the mechanism could use either zero-wear optical reading, or relatively kind blunt-ended sensor pegs. It's more likely the mechanism would wear out - bear in mind each set of holes only has to pass through the mechanism once per read cycle, and so only gets that slight bit of wear and tear, but the reader itself may pass many thousands of 5-hole positions through itself for a single read cycle.

[@codecage9333]

@@TahreyUK On a 33 it was 8 holes. It was a Baudot era TTY that used 5 holes.

[@Trance88]

This is pretty incredible.

[@ewetoo]

Now THIS is retro!

[@davidgari3240]

OG here. Yeah I used an ASR-33 teletype in college for nu

[@davidgari3240]

Numeric Control Machining. I could type faster than 10cps (110baud) but got into the rhythm like an IBM Selectric typewriter. Both were marvels of mechanical engineering. Meanwhile the apparently perfectly good Hazeltine 1500 glass teletype in the corner, looks on and laughs.

[@renakunisaki]

Back in the day when the monitor didn't have pixels, it had a couple switches and LEDs. What's the processing speed of one of these? I see it was taking several seconds to compute 2-digit prime numbers.

[@computerfis]

A whopping Intel 8080, 2.0 MHz! :D

[@dreamyrhodes]

Actually there was no monitor at all. The teletyper was your keyboard and the monitor in one machine (and "disk drive" of course if you compare the paper tape to a disk), the LEDs actually only showed the set bits at the current memory page, which included instructions and data in binary code.

[@RaymondHng]

+Rena Kunisaki One could have purchased a CRT dumb terminal, but they were double in cost to the teleprinter.

[@Mr.1.i]

They were geniuses the people who did 4k roms

[@HuntersMoon78]

Yes it maybe slow at doing it's thing, but it's super interesting to watch

[@ct6502-c7w]

This is fascinating, but holy cow you had to go through all THAT just to start BASIC?! So everytime you started the computer and wanted to write programs, you had to go through that whole process?! I'll bet people just left it on the most of the time.

[@TestTest-nm2lo]

How did you get the terminal to run without a mainframe?

[@jackkraken3888]

And to think this was the first commercial PC, its positively stoneage in comparison to what we have now. But there is a quality to these early machines that is lost on modern ones, the modern ones are considered cheap and disposable, sad really.

[@TahreyUK]

On the other hand, they do bring almost unimaginable information processing and retrieval powers within the grasp of almost everyone with any kind of disposable income (what with Smartphones now costing £25 or less, which makes it something even a third world subsistence farmer could try to save up for), and makes the decision whether to apply electronic logic to all manner of problems something that rarely has to be made on the basis of sheer material cost any more (when microcontrollers with better-than-Altair specs can be had literally for pennies), so it's not really that bad a thing.

[@BrianPicchi]

What am amazing video! Thanks for doing this demonstration.

[@bstulic]

I remember doing this, main point was to upset teacher we did not like in a classroom right next to room with computers...noise was awesome :D

[@sky-persuitofwonder]

bstulic lmao

[@Fiilis1]

I wanna see you playing Crysis on that paper !

[@allanegleston4931]

i live in an apartment . my neigbors would just "love " this . esp downstairs . chunka chunka chunka .:):):):):)

[@brandongoodrich9354]

Where did you get the 4k basic tape?

[@CatTheRoundEarther]

Imagine being this guy's SO walking into the house and hearing the concofany of a TTY.

[@miljororforsprakpartiet290]

Would be cool to play Snake on that typewriter. Screw frames per second, paper-meters per hour ftw!

[@nonyadamnbusiness9887]

Memories. Back when a computer sounded like a hay baler. I started with computers right at the end of this age as a freshman in high school. The computer room at the local college was mostly occupied by a glass wall partition protecting rows of cabinets and reel to reel drives. The din of was deafening. By the time I started university, that had all been replaced with Macs and PCs, quiet as the library.

[@jakethesnake05]

what year was it mede

[@PhirePhlame]

Are there any teletype machines still being made?

[@Natalie-ez1zc]

Not after ~1984.

[@codecage9333]

But collectors, a group called GreenKeys, are still keeping them alive!

[@herdware]

Thanks for this nice video series.