Wow, this was the game that got me into programming. I saw it on a commodore Pet, had to have it, bought the PET,got the program, tore it apart until I understood every line of code. Almost 50 years later I am finishing my career as a software engineer who never went to college.
What I like about this video is that it is shown in real-time and not edited or sped up. It shows what it was really like for those who used the Altair in 1975, which was leading-edge computing at that time. By today's standards, its unbearably slow, but in 1975 it was impressive to be able to have a computer that was smaller than a mainframe that often took up an entire floor of an office building.
In 1975 the Altair used paper rolls with tiny holes that represented the machine bytes in memory. There was no cassette input. The computer museum has images of it.
But then it would have taken even longer to load BASIC. No instant boot of BASIC. And having that much RAM in 1975 would have been astonishing and ultra ultra expensive
I built an Altair 8800 in 1975. Actually, just the parts required to build 48K of RAM would have (in 1975 dollars) cost enough to buy 2 new Toyota Corollas at that time. My Altair had only 256 bytes of RAM which came as part of the kit. But in 1977, I built another S-100 bus computer based on a (Vector Graphic) Z-80 motherboard, a Northstar floppy disk controller, somebody's I/O board, and a 4K RAM board kit. That RAM kit cost $477 (1977) dollars. So even then, it would have cost about $5,700 to build 48K of RAM. I never heard of anyone putting more than 16K in a machine during that era. There wasn't much incentive to do so. With the software of the time, a programmer, gamer, etc. would have a hard time coming up with anything that would utilize even that much memory.
In 1975 the college I was attending had a particle accelerator. The various counters were interfaced to an Altair 8800. I was NOT a science student so I don't know any more than that. I love watching the registers change when the software is running! I DID play Star Trek but we had to do that on the mainframe. The interface was a teletype and you could type *Star Trek* and hit enter. Then the Tech in the control room would mount the tape and load the program for you.
OMG. There was a version of this game running on the Univac 90/70 mainframe where I started my first job as a trainee COBOL programmer in 1978. Several of us used to spend our lunchtimes trying to get the fastest win! And on the subject of cassette tape loading, you could spot the owners of early 70's/80's micro/mini computers. They all had indentations in their fingers where they used to cross their fingers all the time when trying to load a tape program! 🙂
I played that Star Trek game in a Radio Shack store on the TRS-80 they had on display there. Was cool to be a kid when all the PCs starting coming out.
Gates found Basic language interpreter in a recycle bin at Harvard it's computer department. Allen and Gates changed it so to run on the Altair instead of a PDP. Gates is well known for modifying existing products and pretending it's his invention. MS Dos was actually Q Dos which Gates bought for 50000 and Q Dos was stolen from Digital Research founder Gary Kildall who was later murdered by a hit on the head. When Gates friend Paul Allen got cancer Bill tried to dispose of him but Allen oerheard Steve Ballmer and Gates dividing his shares of Microsoft by accident. Paul Allen compared Ballmer with a German which i don't mention here.
This is the best video I have seen of what it was like to use an Altair PC. I started using PCs with a Radio Shack TRS 3 in high school, and a COmmodore Vic-20 at home. But I never understood how to efficiently (for the day) use an Altair from just a few years earlier. The Altair was different to me because of the switches which made it look like something from the 1950s to me in the 1980s. NNow I can see how a terminal made it useful. I even had that same Panasonic Cassette recorder. Very cool!
One of the best computer games ever. I used to play it in RT-11 BASIC on a PDP-11 in the early 80s, at school. I seem to recall porting it to my Superboard II in 1983 using PEEK and POKE to the screen to make a zero-scroll version on the game. IIRC I managed to get it to run with 8-bytes of free memory, of my 64KB total, comprising 128x 2114 memory chips! Good times!
Hey Tim - I'm time traveling back from 2022. I'd forgotten how long programs took to load. The "classic" Star Trek game was fun to play in the day - and even more fun to program as it teaches a TON of lessons in computer programming. Thanks for sharing this.
Ah, the days of loaded and storing programs on cassette tape, I remember them well. It also was a great improvement when I got my Northstar Floppy disk drive in 1978. Now my IMSAI, has seen many improvements, including 8 inch floppy drives and 2 20 MB HD's. Slowly restoring my IMSAI back to health as it hasn't run in about 30+ years.
@@timothycolegrove4365 I really depends on the disk controller. If you have brand xyzzy (in which nothing happens), then all you need is the BIOS. Right now there are a few new controllers on the market. The one I am going to use for my new S100 system is the FDC from s100computers.com. This system is a 2 board solution - SBC z80 with on board CF storage (enough to get CP/M running) and the z80 based FDC board to talk to a real 8 inch floppy drive so I can pull a lot of the software I have on the hundreds of 8 inch disks that I have.
Brings back memories. I'm old enough to have built one when they first came out and ran basic on it after Bill released it. Star Trek was an awesome game for the time. Even on my current M1 iMac it looks like fun. 🤣
I remember old days when you use a stone to store up to 4 kb. You had to be rich in order to buy a stone writer. There was a hammer inside attached to a spring which made small holes as they represented 0's and 1's. They were read by a brush spinning at 50 rpm. Those pc's were powered by pedals you had to push with your feet.
I always wanted an Altarir computer ..I recall having the 1974 popular Electronics where it was on the cover ..Time went by and i became an Intel engineer .. and never had that chance ..Ahhhh !
My dad used to be a computer engineer on such monoliths as the ICT 1301 (google it). That had to be booted manually, with all the commands linked to lit switches. Oh, and the input was punched cards!
I remember one of my early experiences with a computer was with an Altair or something similar around 1977 or 78. The Star Trek game was still readily available and I played it as late as 1982.
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU.[2] Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics[3] and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines.[4][5] According to Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s.[6] It was the first commercially successful personal computer.[7] The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.[8][9] The Altair 8800 had no built-in screen or video output, so it would have to be connected to a serial terminal (such as a VT100-compatible terminal) to have any output. To connect it to a terminal a serial interface card had to be installed. Alternatively to using a terminal Altair could be programmed using its front-panel switches.
Amazing to see this computer actually working. Impressive for that time load software from tape. Dreams factory I think And now we have such a monster power in our pockets today with no surprise or enthusiasm.
We dont get surprised anymore because the leaps in technology are just the standart increment of raw power. Plus, we all have been in touch with technology for more than a decade, so we are very oh so much used to it and know what to expect. People on 1975 barely ever saw, let alone interact, with a home computer, so any kind of change was felt like a groundbreaking achievement.... Because it was.
I remember playing a similar game on my Atari 800XL. Sometimes our friends would pretend to be on the starship enterprise and one person would be the captain and the other person would be the one executing the command based on what the "captain" said. I forgot how long it used to take to load programs on cassettes. It was so much faster once I got a floppy disk drive.
A friend of mine has a tabletop game called Living Constellations, an interstellar space setting where the tech level is often limited to the 70s or so. Most of my computer knowledge is more mid-80s to late 90s, so I'm watching videos of older stuff to familiarize myself a little more with consumer-level electronics of the time. This video was very freaking cool and useful.
When I opened the box for my 8800B I got the sinking feeling that there was no way that all these parts could work. But they did. I also had the same feeling for the ADM terminal. Then came the reality that I had no idea what to do with this stuff.
That looks very much like my original setup from 1977, except that I saw everyone using a cassette tape and realized that this was a major handicap. I spent most of my money for a floppy disk drive and went to CP/M. Thus, not everyone in this era went with this primitive setup.
This was the VERY first computer (Altair 8800 and while it seems to be a different Star Trek game) I was introduced to by my uncle in May of 1978. But I seem to remember he had the game on an 8" disk drive. The Star Trek game I played was a 10x10 grid.. if my memory holds up. It also had . . . . Periods, *, E. What memories...
I got a listing of this exact game from my step father's mini-computer where he worked. I ported it to Apple-Soft BASIC (Apple-II) when I was 15 years old. That was it, I was hooked on computer programming and have been doing it ever since. Wish I still had that listing. There was another game listing I got too, it was called "wumpus".
When I was a student at UC Berkeley back in the late 1970’s, my friends and I would go to Evans Hall late at night and play this game with a room full of other students. This was on a PDP 11/70
Darn, I was hoping to watch you play a bit! Great video though! In 1975 I was 12 and still several years away from my first computer experience, so these things looked like scifi at the time!
On the program loading, maybe best to use a cassette deck where you can have speaker and line out activated at the same time so you can just hear when the program is complete
I have a 1980 version of this game that I ported to an IBM PC compatible to run under its BASIC. It had a 6x6 galaxy grid and 10x10 sector grid. Later ported it to compiled DOS BASIC, and later ported it again to Visual BASIC (basically just ran the original version in a text window with a couple of extra button controls). I also saw an IBM mainframe version of this game ca. 1977. I still play it occasionally. At long game, expert level, there are game numbers (random start numbers) that will generate games almost impossible to beat. When you have 88 K's with 6 or so commanders and cross-galaxy tractor beams that can haul your depleted butt into an ambush, what can you do? You can often abandon ship, get traded in a prisoner exchange and wind up as caption of the Faerie Queene. :) In my game, escaping an ambush by attempting to leave the quadrant means the escape direction is randomized--you're not certain where you'll wind up. Good times. Edit: Various versions of this game had different added features. In mine, you can (if subspace radio is still working), ask to have the entire ship teleported to the nearest star base. Because you most often end up as a scattered cloud of atoms, you only use this option when all else fails. In another, the Enterprise had an "experimental death ray." Also only for use in emergency situations. Sometimes it would work and kill all the K's in a sector grid. Sometimes it would kill all life in the galaxy, including you. And sometimes you'd get the message, "DEATH RAY CREATES 2 KLINGONS IN QUADRANT." When the ship's computer got damaged, you found yourself doing on-the-fly arctangents for pointing the torpedoes, and you got to be pretty good at it. In most games, running at warp 10 would, if it didn't blow the engines, occasionally toss you back in time a bit so that you had extra time to kill the remaining Klingons. As I said, good times!
Hi - A great game in many different versions Earliest the heading were i think between 1 and 6 - like a compass Some had computer / calc you entered coordinance and it gave you the angle, you has some leeway if the enemy was at say 3.0 you would score a kill with 2.87 - 3.15 or similar You can obtain the game and the source code to Mike Mayfield original version - very similar to that is displayed on this video A late version around dos 3-4 time saw it using curser keys to nagivate a lotus 123 style menu EGA trek by Nels Anderson is the one you mention with the death ray - i have i think 4 versions of it, it is about 1 of 6 shareware items that i have bought and registered. It is a game i have played for 30 years !! Mostly all the same, except later version you use load or mine, most notable the last versions the star trek key words are removed due to copywrite infingement Regards George
This is how I got into computing around 1979 with an Alpha LSI II and punchtape on a teletype. Loading Startrek took 20 minutes. Loading Basic a little less. We had 16 kWords of RAM for BASIC and application.
Been playing Fallout 3 recently and I bet the inspiration for the 70s style computer terminals in Fallout 3 came from the Altair terminal! Anyways enjoyed the video, very interesting to see how an early computer worked and great to see they can be made to work today!
Like running a player piano in 1925. Like playing a wax cylinder in 1935. Like driving a horse and buggy in 1945. Like playing a 78 record in 1965, Like using an adding machine in 1975. Shall I go on?
*just a cassette tape* The alternative would have been a big tape recorder. Compact cassette tapes were invented in the 1960s but became a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s.
Played the same game on the old IMSAI 8080. Didn't have BASIC in ROM though. Had to load it from cassette first, then load the game. You using the Tarbell cassette interface?
The fact the front panwl was OCTAL was a huge turn off to me. I MUCH preferred the IMSAI. Prior to the Altair, i had built a small computer based upon the IBM 360 instruction set because I was an IBM assembly lang. programmer since 1969
Hi Timothy, I'm quite new to the world of the Intel 8080 and Altair 8800. I've came to this video after reading Charles Petzold's "Code second edition". He builds a tapered-down version of the 8080 and describes how this computer used the 8080. I'm wondering how did you manage to get the BASIC interpreter to run on the 8080? Wouldn't you need to toggle the machine instructions into memory by hand(switches)? In other words, how did you get the BASIC interpreter loaded into memory? Thanks
Very interesting and cool video. It’s a little scary that there’s no indication that the data is loading from the tape. How do you know the computer isn’t frozen?
rule #7 of the computer programmer: wear climbing boots when programming, in case a mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the computer room.... (sight) those good old days!
In the late 90s I tried a star trek type game and did it in Microsoft Qbasic. Had a divide by zero error I never could figure out. Eventually lost interest in it.
I believe that the machine could have different front panel overlays installed, depending on which country the machine was being used in and which language was required.
Computer guy circa 1975 " You betcha boss . I 'm working my butt off down here. Say , I'm starting my program now you want to go to the corner coffee shop with me and grab a cup while it loads."
