I just stumbled across (again) the original announcement for the Altair in Pop Electronics, 1975. And again, I laughed at the ridiculous copy that someone used for the announcement. Without doubt, this was written by some ad employee following input from a techie, and understanding none of it. Not sure what the copyright status is, although I have seen it posted on many old websites for years, so I will just give a link to the image.
https://vintagecomputer.net/images/Popt ... 1_pg33.jpg
To start...
"...full-blown computer that can hold its own against sophisticated minicomputers now on the market." A box with no keyboard, no display, input only by binary switches and output by binary lights is competition for a PDP-11, or an IBM System 36?
"...can be economically expanded for 65000 words." (bytes, he meant) Economically? In 1976, an 8k kit was $165. Times 8 is $1344. In 1976 money. Or about $7500 bucks today. That would have definitely been the rich kid on the block with a 64k Altair. And that is not even considering the need for a full motherboard and the 16 to 25 amps needed just for the memory cards. (Actually, when the Altair was announced, I think only 4k cards were available to the average hobbyist.)
However, if you had the amount of money equivalent to the cost of a Corvette in those days, you could have "...up to 65000 routines going at the same time." This proves that the writer was not technical. I assume he got subroutines mixed up with ram size. You could definitely have 64k of subroutines, as long as they just consisted of a RET statement. Not very productive and certainly not all "going" at the same time.
In the sidebar is a few more defugalties. "Number of auxiliary registers: 8 plus stack pointer, program counter and accumulator. Actually, there are 6 registers, definitely not auxiliary, besides the two index regs and the acc.
"Number of subroutine levels: 65000." Again the nonsense statement that is getting confused with ram or something.
Any how, it is fun to look back to the old days when the hobby was brand new (and loads of fun), and in this case, with the icing on the technical cake being the phony cardboard Altair that was shown in the magazine.
Ken
(My first Altair clone was built in late 1975 and cost $625, a number that I will never forget since it was a good part of a months wages. 8080, 24k, Radio Shack cassette, horrible keyboard and Sears portable TV as monitor. By the time we began to get interested, MITS was swamped with orders and the wait time for new customers was about a century. Thus, if you wanted a system, you built it.)