Even without Wargames, this is an iconic computer. Those colored paddle switches and dark bezel with LEDs behind them screamed “computer”. Only thing missing wa

Even without Wargames, this is an iconic computer. Those colored paddle switches and dark bezel with LEDs behind them screamed “computer”. Only thing missing was a reel to reel tape drive. In contrast to the Altair, it was actually more subdued and less substantial. “Just” a bunch of toggle switches and lights. Could have been anything. Maybe an elaborate model railroad control panel. Industrial, perhaps, but not necessarily a computer. The IMSAI was my first contact with computers. The one we had was built as a student project the year before. It had a keyboard, video, an open chassis 9” monitor (no touching!), 8K of RAM, and the ubiquitous cassette interface. My instructor taught me BASIC in a hour and left the lab, leaving me to flail the rest of the evening. I forgot something fundamental and couldn’t get anything to work. (It was expressions.) He answered my question the next day, I “aha’d” and that was the last formal instruction I had for computers for 3 years until I took Fortran in college. All self taught through books, magazines, etc. Alone, I had no one really to talk to. For whatever reason I never really talked to my instructor about it again. I ditched my first class playing with that thing. We never turned it off, if you did you had to type in, oh, 30-50 bytes of hex code into the monitor so you could load BASIC from cassette. I tried to use the front panel to do it once, that got old very fast. It didn’t work. Next year we had several PET computers donated, and I never touched the IMSAI again. I spent a lot of time on the PETs. I routinely broke into the room that housed them in the library, climbing up and in through the window. But the IMSAI, that was my black monolith in the swamp, that just happened to be blue, that touched me first.