Retro Tech

It was an exciting day at Big Tech company, since we got a visit from Chris Hoff. Chris blogs at Rational Survivability, which has been on the blogroll here since, well, since there's been a blogroll here.

Now Chris is a wicked smart security guy - if you're into virtualization, you'll want to check out his presentation on the Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse. Fun stuff (really!), but extra-super-crazy security geeky. That's my bag, baby, but may not be yours.

But that's not the point of the post. In the lobby of Big Tech company is the "Hall of Dead Computers", and in that hall is this:


Yup - an IMSAI 8080, from 1975. While the MITS Altair was the first Personal Computer, this is perhaps the first clone. Unlike the Altair's 4040 CPU, this used the brand spanking new Intel 8080, which gave you a full eight bits of processing power. Cooking with gas.

The "keyboard" was the front panel switch bank. The "display" were the blinkenlights, also on the front panel (click to embiggen - this is a real taste of geek history). You had to enter your program by setting the switches, and determine the output by looking at the pattern of LEDs - clearly, this was not a computer for your Mom.

Note to Mac users: No, I'm not making this up. Really.

As it turns out, Hoff had one of these. I actually picture him as Matthew Broderick in Wargames, which also featured one of these. Yes, watching one of these running really was that visually spectacular. In a very extra-super-crazy geeky way.

UPDATE 5 November 2008 22:58: Guns and Guts has an uber post about retro computing that he did. If you dig this kind of thing, go RTWT.