Thanks for the kind words, guys. Honestly, all the credit goes to Mike Douglas, Martin Eberhard, Gary Kaufman and Jerry Walker. I just built what they designed.
I mainly wanted to show the build process as "eye candy" for anyone else thinkin' about building an Altair 8800c. It helps get 'em lusty enough to pull the trigger.
The couple of little tips and tricks I found along the way were worth mention too, I think. My hope was it helps others with the tiny details that sometimes make a difference.
TheoAU wrote:What are you going to do with all those empty card slots?
I bought a handful of other cards at the same time that I bought the boards I've listed here in this thread. Just haven't mentioned them. For example, I bought a non-volatile memory board from JM Precision. It uses a battery to make it act like core memory. I also bought an SD card interface. Not sure if that one will "play nice" with the other stuff, but we'll see. And I bought some proto boards too.
I was planning to make an analog/digital I/O board for the S100 buss, something that has digital inputs, 3A digital outputs and an old-school 8-bit DAC and 8-bit ADC. Thought about maybe doing an old Votrax speech synthesizer too. But after buying the proto boards, I have since seen a few people talking about similar projects, so I might be re-inventing the wheel with that stuff. If so, I might just buy their boards instead of designing my own. We'll see.
But yeah, I think I see your point - I think you're making the point - that 18 slots aren't needed these days. If I were running 4Kb RAM boards, the 18-slotter would be useful but now, probably not.
Looks cool though. Looks like an old-school Altair. And surprisingly, the reactance from those long traces don't seem to butcher the signals, even without terminators. The 2Mhz speed no doubt helps out there.
Just gotta say,
"Real computers have front-panels!"