MITS ALTAIR 8800 #2

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) ALTAIR 8800

Accession Number: 202000208

ID Number: 1153

This system was donated by George J. Roy. It was purchased as a kit, and assembled by George.

Serial Number 223482K. The "K" at the end of the serial number usually means that it was sold as a kit. From the date codes on the boards, it looks like this system is from early 1976.

The MITS Altair 8800 was designed in 1974 by Ed Roberts and Bill Yates at MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is based on the Intel 8080 CPU and the backplane is the S-100 bus. The Altair was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and was sold by mail order. The designers were surprised when they sold thousands of the kits in the first month. Altair BASIC for this machine was the product that caused Microsoft to really grow.

This system has had the Grounding Modification performed that connects Logic Ground to Chassis Ground in many places. It has the earlier multiple 4-slot backplanes.

This system has had the Grounding Modification performed that connects Logic Ground to Chassis Ground in many places. It has the earlier multiple 4-slot backplanes.

MITS ALTAIR #2 Restoration Page 

We need to find or make Micropolis MDOS and Micropolis Extended BASIC on diskettes for this system.

To boot MDOS from diskette:

Set the address switches to F400

Press RESET, EXAMINE, and then RUN

Mike Douglas (https://deramp.com/) has been very helpful with the software part of this restoration. He wrote and provided a version of PC2FLOP that will allow us to create a bootable MDOS diskette for this system. Mike provided a toggle in loader that will load PC2FLOP through the serial console port, and then download an MDOS diskette image using the XMODEM protocol, and write it to a diskette. Once we get the console to work we will give it a try.