Very nice! I actually found a mint 8800b in the rafters here at work during a cleanout. Took it home and added it to my collection. It was used as a PLC to control a machine with custom I/O cards and ROM around the very late 70's.

Very cool, it was fun to play with. Thanks for also including the Altair info, that was a blast from the past.

If you're looking for something a little more downloadable, z80pack has emulation for Altair 8800/Imsai 8080 including front panel emulation:

https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/screenshots/2014.h...

Comes with prepackaged CP/M images and can run Alan Cox's amazing FUZIX system:

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

https://hackaday.com/2017/04/16/z80-fuzix-is-like-old-fashio...

This makes me put my ZX Spectrum in the right perspective.

The Z80 is a science fiction luxury space ship when compared to the 8080.

The Z80's nice, but I always thought of the 6809 as the Chrysler Cordoba of 8 bit microprocessors, with soft Corinthian Leather upholstery and a luxurious automatic multiply instruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsg97bxuJnc

I'll never respect a CPU that needs 4 clock cycles to do a NOP. ;-)

Shouldn't it get confused when you turn it on and off really fast again and again?

What did people use these for in real life? Were they essentially toys or were there peripherals that made them useful for solving problems?

That's a bit like asking what did carpenters did with hammers and hand-saws in this age of CAD/CAM. :)

I assure you the Altairs were quite useful. Mostly, owners enjoyed the luxury of working on their very own computer, rather than a time-share machine's account from the corporation or university.

It's difficult to communicate how this felt, in this age of ubiquitous computing. A machine that one could reboot whenever you wanted. Tinker. Explore. They wrote games. Controlled hardware. Learned what made a computer tick. Connect a modem and talk to others. Sure, it was primitive, but at the time it felt as cutting-edge as space travel.

If I recall correctly, the Altair ran CP/M, and could run the early Zork infocom text adventure series.

I guess the basic model was so lacking in features that I found it hard to understand how people would make use of it. So it's more like asking how people actually used old steam cars after watching a video of Jay Leno spending hours prepping his and learning they could only drive 15 miles between fill-ups.

I did some research after posting that and realized that you could get teletype terminals for them. This makes it much easier to see what people did. I originally thought that most people punched op-codes into that front panel, which seems like an awful lot of work for not much reward.

Video of someone loading BASIC with a teletype:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk

All of my college peeps learned BASIC* while running the interpreter. We learned to fingerbone in the seq. to load from the tape, after the tape loaded I don't recall, but we then could get an OK prompt maybe from the BASIC interpreter. We used TeleType terminals w/paper rolls to print, with a tape reader. In parallel we learned Motorola MC6800 mach language on the new Heathkit trainers; our final task was to interface a speaker and play "Anchors Away" as my prof was an ex Navy instructor. *We learned BASIC, but by applying it to data and practical problems IIRC like physics of projectile motion, electrical like resistors, simple databases. Was a Pop Electronics reader from 1970 or so.

This is really well executed. I had a project like this on my idea list, although for the Raspberry Pi.

This makes me want to go code a 8080 emulator.

That simulator has an 8080 emulator built-in. It's fully functional.