Re: [amsat-bb] Re: Now: Mnemonic and icon wanted - Was Re: Doppler'sFirstname?

[Margaret Leber <maggie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

cbuttsch@slonet.org wrote:
 > Would you believe Margaret, I still have my Altair kit in the garage?

Sure. I still have an Altair-compatible TDL Xitan (Z80, 16K) in my 
basement. A damn fine machine for its day, with a software suite that 
gave Altair a run for their money.

Mike Murphree wrote:

 > Even with Google, I wasn't able to find any connections between the
 > Estes Transroc and MITS...

A little further digging reveals that the kit Estes sold as the Transroc 
was a kit version of Richard Fox's "Foxmitter" and "Foxmitter II" 
designs, published in Model Rocktery magazine in 1969-70. I may still 
have them around somewhere too. :-)  These devices all transmitted on CB 
frequencies.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/archives/rec.models.rockets/ARTICLES/payloadFAQ.txt

> ...even then Microsoft had problems with their bloatware ways <grin>:

Let's bear in mind that Gates and Allen didn't actually build Altair 
BASIC on an Altair. They didn't even *have* an Altair. All they had was 
an emulator they'd written that ran on a DEC machine. When they pitched 
BASIC to Roberts, it was the first time anybody had tried to run the 
code on an actual Altair.

I think we can forgive them for needing more than a few hundred bytes to 
build a BASIC interpreter. Of course, the 8K BASIC had GOSUB and DEF 
(and CONTINUE) as well as string functions. And 16K BASIC (you could get 
away with 12) had formatted PRINT and diskette I/O.

  73 de Maggie K3XS

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