by gmh » March 18th, 2015, 7:57 pm
While I'm away from home I have the Clone running CP/M. I have physical copies of David Ahl's BASIC Games books (and heaps of other classics), and lately I've been playing a lot of Poker (so much nicer once you compile it using BASCOM). At work I'm surrounded by servers running (Solaris, *BSD, GNU) and network hardware (Cisco, Juniper, etc), CP/M makes a nice change while I'm waiting for a config to drop, or a server to update. It's also a laugh showing the young guys here how different hardware/operating systems were back in the day. I'm sure they'd flip if they saw me enter the boot loader for 8K BASIC, and then waiting 10+ minutes for it to load.
BTW I think you have confused how I actually have my set up configured. The Altair 8800 Clone is connected to my OpenBSD shell server (random muck around box) via serial. The minicom terminal emulator (output looks similar to my VT510 terminal, which is the reason I like it) is the only thing running on OpenBSD that is used to connect to the Clone. Moving forward I'll create a user account that logs straight in to the serial connection, that way I can let my friends play around with the Clone when I'm not using it. A Raspberry Pi would be an ideal machine to do the same, all the *nixes include multiple terminal emulators (minicom, screen, cu etc), I'm using a low powered Soekris net6501 box (basically a router).