>the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switche

>the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switches to enter data just to be clear, at the very same time in history, the PDP-10 was a very large computer and cost orders of magnitude more, and pretty much looked the same https://hackaday.com/2014/10/28/restoring-a-pdp-10-console-panel/ https://hackaday.com/2014/10/28/restoring-a-pdp-10-console-p... You could easily automatically boot either of these computers (without having to enter the code through switches) by putting a ROM at bootup address that had the same code in it. That's still how computers work today. They only gave you the switches because it wasn't established yet that everybody would want to put the same code in. and the large IBM 360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS-WtjwAAO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS-WtjwAAO0 and the followon IBM 370 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLnvvOoWnzU&t=41s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLnvvOoWnzU&t=41s the amazing thing about the Altair 8800 (intel 8080) was that simply, for the first time, you could have these same blinken lights at home and do all the mittengrabbin and gefingerpokin you want to https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/blinkenlights.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/blinkenlights.htm... within a very short time (same timeframe) the SWTPC 6800 (motorola 6800) came out and it chose not to have the lights and switches, it booted into a little debugger which was simplistic but would let you accomplish the same thing of entering in the code you really wanted. It required a terminal though, which raised the cost of entry. https://deramp.com/swtpc.html https://deramp.com/swtpc.html The only reason we don't get the lights and switches any more is that they think we don't want them. But you and I know we do, so upvote this comment to record shattering levels and I'll share it with Apple and Dell and we'll get our real computing platform back again! Also, post your code for a good adblocker we can enter through the front panel.